Mostly I despair over academia's reluctance to embrace open access publishing. I've been told it would be career suicide to favour open access journals over the closed and secretive traditional type, and that not even co-authoriship with an established name would help. This strikes me as ethically questionable coming from sociology. Then along comes stuff like this which seems to at least represent a bridge between the old and the new.

I was scouting around the net trying to get a handle on Latour and Law and Actor Network Theory and found this via Law's publications listing at the Lancaster website. The alphabetical listing is impressive: Cronin, Jessop, Law, Tolmie, Urry - these are not names to be sneezed at. Urry is particularly good at the mobilities of globalisation and is one of the few to have done some decent empirical research on cosmopolitanism. He's done a Bourdieuish exercise with photography and visual mobilities which I thought was very clever.

These are not necessarily peer reviewed, published papers which is both good and bad. Bad because of traditional bibliography requirements, good because you can get a handle on the writer's thinking as it progresses, which is something the net can do that scholarly publishing can't. Or not very well anyway, and certainly not all in one place. Law's stuff is written in ordinary English rather than obscure terminology, which is good when you're trying to learn something new.

The object, the actant, is a relatively new concept that was difficult to refigure from the realist notion of an objectively existing, material object to the relationally existing conceptual object which is the socially and culturally constructed artefact that is/was the poll wars, or Antony Green's calculator, or the worm. Consistent with the actant, these things acted upon us, invited or enabled us to act with, and upon, them, and exist as tools we can think with in Levi-Strauss' terms. We did not create them all, but we did construct the meaning of all of them.

The dynamics of the time, from November 2006 to November 2007, were difficult to describe as both discrete events and a collective mosaic with cumulative meaning. But Law helps here too, arguing that the requirement for specificity is a bit of a con job that produces misleading results. We'd be better off accepting that life is messy and research would produce better knowledge if methodologies acknowledged that. How to explain the relationship between The Australian dummy spit editorial and the number of Kevin Rudd's MySpace friends? How to explain the cumulative effect of the Chaser's YouTube videos from APEC and little nobody's comments about election leaflets dropped in their neighbourhoods? You can't do that in any kind of central-theme way. You just have to accept that the mess that was online participation during 2007 added up to a really big mess that provided a certainty that wasn't available anywhere else.