Generally we all have a "theory of agency," even if we don't explicitly articulate them
Fischer's view of agency: We have choices, but within social and cultural constraints
The documentary has an interesting theory of human and technological agency
How Fischer critiqued others
Impact analysis: Mostly gives agency to people in power. "Kern's analysis also raises issues of evidence."
Symptomatic approaches: Life is messier, not homogenous; wrangling with large arcs of history
Master narrative
Methodological argument: what do you think counts as evidence?
Be reflective about causality
Critiques media studies figures: Raymond Williams, Joshua Meyerowitz
post hoc ergo propter hoc
User heuristic
Social constructivism takes production and adoption of technology into mind; what's missing is reception/audience studies
Marxism's false consciousness, misleading narrators, etc. vs. can we trust users as conscious, accurate?
Foreshadows recent scholarship on tech use in e.g. third-world countries
Latour
Media Lab at Sciences Po, documentary arm
Lab life
Has had to mount defense of climate change since deniers have been using actor-network theory
Most recent publication: 2018 book
What's at stake?
"Object rights activist"
Hey sociologists, the "missing mass" you're looking for is right in front of you. Has a kind of humor, uses door as an tangible example
What about infrastructures, digital materiality?
Flat ontologies: are we going to give equal dues to non-humans? How seriously will you take this idea? How (much) should we center our methods and theories around them?
"No human is as relentlessly moral as a machine" we tell them what ideals we want to hold ourselves to and they enforce them on us
Playful, evocative writing style
Part of our social assemblage, quite a provocation
Morality exists because previous human actors recognized a lack of consistency, a deviation from the moral path we wanted to walk, thus designing the non-human actors to reinforce this
Delegation, prescription, distribution of competences
Circuit between technology and humans
"As a person, he seems kinda like a jerk"
Humor reminiscent of 60s/70s British sci-fi writers, e.g. just woman cooking eggs in kitchen but it's sci-fi, she's being controlled by all the morally ambiguous machines around her