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Maria,<br>
I am somewhat uneasy to call something like a technoinfrastructure an "actor".
For me, an actor is someONE you has the capacity and the will to act. Artefacts
can not act by themselves but have inbuilt rules. The question for me then
is: who built which rules in the artefact, who was ecluded in using it, which
are the "costs"=efforts to use it, who covers for the cost, etc. So, in any
case, the artefact is a socially constructing being, not an actor by itself.<br>
Of course, artefacts shape the opportunity and constraints structure of
humans (and organisations) that use them. But this is not the result of
an independent will. This is the result of social decisions about the use
(or non-use) of specific material characteristics.<br>
<br>
Also, I would add to your list economic factors, for instance business models,
user tariffs etc. and operational guidelines. The latter is often not considered
in sociological discussions of the construction and use of an artefact but
it may become the most important part of it as the rules decide how to use
the artefact. And, of course, there sometimes is a nice struglle about the
rules. Think of the French telecom engineers who conceived the minitel as
a centra server model and who were surprised that users linked terminals not
to the server for database retrieval but to link through to communicate with
other end terminal users. This was the birthday of the messager services on
minitel which had their strongest use when someone invented minitel rose (I
guess you have to translate "someone" into: male, below 30 years, single,
trained in science or engineering, ...) . So, the fellow enginners were
strongly against this morally incorrect use of a marvel of communication technology.
I don't know who made the decision to allow messenger services even when
they transported porn, I guess, no prejudice, this must have been people
from the finance department. Look into the works of Volker Schneider and
his comparison with the British videotext and the German Btx services (together
with Graham Thomas and Thierry Vedel).<br>
<br>
Did you integrate the videotext services as a precursor in your description
? <br>
<br>
Cordialement<br>
Frank<br>
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