#EA

Readers already familiar with ANT will appreciate that ANT was heavily referenced throughout Liza Potts' (2014) book and often in comparison to a budding new theory, Experience Architecture (EA). The ANT concepts of actors, actor networks, and “moments of translation” created by networks were likened to the activity occurring by users in “web ecosystems” that EA is opening up for interdisciplinary inquiry. In short, experience architects are the “humanists, technologists, and social scientists” who often work in teams to map out web ecosystems, how the actors in those networks interact in those web ecosystems and what tools they use, in order to build communication systems that support them in times of chaos (p. 15). In many ways, EA resembles ANT as well as earlier network communication theories developed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1987), so it’s surprising that Potts (2014) made no reference to these theorists. Regardless, she gave a succinct introduction to EA in the beginning, enriching that initial discussion with more examples and context in each chapter that followed.