Abstract
In our fast-forward times, the special issue ‘Back to the Future: Telling and Taming Anticipatory Media Visions and Technologies’ examines the future-making capacity of networked services and digital data. Its contributions ask about the role media play in forecasting the future and their part in bringing it about. And they are interested in the expectations and anticipatory visions that accompany the formation and spread of new media. Along these lines, the eight articles in this special issue explore the future-making dimension of new media. As a whole, they provide an empirically grounded analysis of the ways media reconfigure the relations and distances among present, past, and future times. The contributions delineate imaginaries of futures related to digital media. Furthermore, they attend to interventions into the plans and efforts of making futures and they inquire about the creation of differently vast and (un)certain horizons of expectation. Together, the articles share the assumption that mediated futures are actively accomplished and enacted; they do not simply appear or wait for us to arrive in them.
Keywords
Digital media, networked services, and aggregate data are beacons of the future. These incessantly emerging tools, resources, and infrastructures project new ways of communication, bring unknown kinds of information, and open up untrodden paths of interaction. They are instrumental for the articulation of future visions and their interface with concrete design choices. More than just being material conveyors of future-oriented ideas, these technologies are deeply intertwined with conceptions about their impact on how we will live, how we will interact, and how we will learn and communicate. Thus, digital networked devices and services are not only technical innovations. More than that, they stay in constant interplay with the sociotechnical imaginaries that inspire and guide their production and diffusion. These imaginaries are, as Jasanoff (2015) states, ‘collectively held, institutionally stabilized, and publicly performed visions of desirable futures, animated by shared understandings of forms of social life and social order attainable through, and supportive of, advances in science and technology’ (p. 4). Given their strong entanglement with material inventions, the interesting question then is not if these imaginaries are fantastic and fictional or real and mundane, but who gets to decide what a desirable future is and how it should be achieved. Since the future takes shape both in sociotechnical imaginaries and material constructions, we have to inquire about the agents and agendas that sponsor or obstruct versions of the future (Marcus, 1995; Taylor, 2004).
On these terms, the history of networked technologies and digitization is animated by powerful ideas about transcending imperfections, for instance, in connecting to others, in sharing information, or in controlling the activities of others. These ideas are highly heterogeneous and involve technocratic, libertarian, countercultural, as well as military visions which have, for instance, inspired the progress made in building the infrastructures and tools around semiconductors and the early internet (Barbrook, 2007; Kline, 2015; Mansell, 2012; Turner, 2006). They too undergird the development of social media, artificial intelligence (AI), communicating robots, and ubiquitous computing (Dourish, 2014; Morozov, 2014; Natale and Ballatore, 2020; Roush, 2017).
What unites the ‘myths’, as Mosco (2004) has called them, that steer these technological innovations is their peculiar future-making capacity: ‘Myths are not just a distortion of reality that requires debunking; they are a form of reality’, he argues (p. 13). As such, they also materialize in the metaphorical monikers we use to refer, for example, to the information superhighway, to platforms, or clouds (Katzenbach and Larsson, 2017). To be sure, this semantic dimension is nothing restricted to networked technologies since all sorts of media involve discourses about their potential and proficiency. ‘From the telegraph to the computer’, as Carey (1992) writes, ‘the same sense of profound possibility is present whenever these machines are invoked’ (p. 18). Arguably, this line of future-making communications could be extended further at least back to the printing press (Eisenstein, 1979). In all settings where media are envisioned and assembled, it remains an open question if and for whom the possibilities that are associated with a new medium have positive or negative effects. Indeed, treating some type of media as being old and others as being new is in itself not reflecting a chronological order or some functional development but is, again, an element of cultural imagination of what constitutes outdated or novel media (Natale, 2016).
What seems to be new today, however, is the kind of unparalleled urgency around the assumed next step to come. While especially evangelists and visionaries from IT business look forward to the imminent opportunities of tomorrow’s even more media-saturated life relying on datafied and autonomously running smart machines, others are afraid of their profound and problematic ramifications. For sure, all kinds of media innovations have engendered utopian and dystopian visions. Yet nowadays the gloomy or bright new worlds are not long-term projections but are set to happen straightaway. This is because alarmist and auspicious positions alike work by dramatizing the time frame available to jump on the bandwagon or halt it. Thus, many popular books of tech-driven utopianism or catastrophism headline with future tropes. Think of Jonathan Zittrain (2008) The Future of the Internet – And How to Stop It, Jaron Lanier (2013) Who Owns the Future?, James Bridle (2018) New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future, Richard Susskind (2018) Future Politics: Living Together in a World Transformed by Tech, Alexandra Levit (2018) Merging Technologies and People for the Workforce of the Future, Shoshana Zuboff (2019) The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, or, with particular acuteness, Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler (2020) The Future is Faster Than You Think. How Converging Technologies are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives.
Examining the future-making capacity of networked services and digital data
In these fast-forward dynamics, the special issue of Convergence ‘Back to the Future: Telling and Taming Anticipatory Media Visions and Technologies’ examines the future-making capacity of networked services and digital data. Its contributions ask about the role media play in forecasting the future and their part in bringing it about. And they are interested in the expectations and anticipatory visions that accompany the formation and spread of new media. Along these lines, the eight articles in this special issue explore the future making dimension of new media. As a whole, they provide an empirically grounded analysis of the ways media reconfigure the relations and distances among present, past, and future times. The contributions delineate imaginaries of futures related to digital media. Furthermore, they attend to interventions into the plans and efforts of making futures and they inquire about the creation of differently vast and (un)certain horizons of expectation. Together, the articles share the assumption that mediated futures are actively accomplished and enacted; they do not simply appear or wait for us to arrive in them.
To see how a variant of such futures is talked into being, Christian Schwarzenegger and Gabriele Balbi turn to consumer and tech fairs. Looking at the media coverage around the annual CEBIT meeting in Hanover, Germany, they examine how the future of digitization was envisioned. The newspaper and magazine articles they studied drew up the image of a quasi-religious future with the industry events as spiritual gatherings and the protagonists as messianic figures. For some, that was a desirable outlook; others were more critical about this naive evangelism and the design choices it implicated.
Forward-looking discourse is also the topic of Christian Pentzold and Denise F. Fechner’s contribution. They use news reports that have a distinct future orientation and examine how these projections are presented and communicated. In particular, they are interested in how data-driven journalism employs multimodal infographics to make sense of probabilities and the inherent uncertainties when formulating predictions about upcoming events and developments. In their study, Pentzold and Fechner distinguish different strategies to modulate the level of speculation which reached from simply insinuating some kind of contingency in the data up to news stories that invited their readers to explore multiple versions of how the future might shape up.
In his article, Aaron Shapiro takes a closer look at the interplay of texts and artifacts. He scrutinizes technology patents and how they are strategically employed in the layout of smart urban spaces. Patents have a particular orientation toward the future as they seek to provide genuine inventions that differ from previous designs and thus warrant intellectual property right protection. To claim such status, patents must specify their innovative element and at the same time they need to be sufficiently imprecise so to cover unanticipated but potentially profitable applications. Therefore, the cases of a Wi-Fi-enabled advertising system, a notification system for autonomous vehicles, and an algorithmic predictive policing platform, which were studied from a Foucauldian perspective, devise ambiguous futures of smart urban governance and control. Rather than being just a matter of technological newness, the patents pivot on scenarios of shaping the relationships between humans, machines, as well as their social and architectural environments.
The idea of the smart city is also the topic of Burcu Baykurt and Christopher Raetzsch’s contribution. Comparing aspiring smart cities in Europe and the United States, they show how different visions of smartness have palpable consequences and materialize in a variety of implementations. Thus, concepts of what makes a city smart resonate with societal shifts, corporate interest, civic initiatives, and technological feasibility. Baykurt and Raetzsch are able to reconstruct how narratives have changed during the financial crisis from a pre-2008 emphasis on sustainability and climate change to a post-2008 focus on entrepreneurship and platformization. Moreover, as part of their historical investigation, they delineate the different directions of building the smart city that prevail in America and Europe. Whereas in the US tech companies are a dominating force, European initiatives aim at a more civic-inspired model of ‘living labs.’
The idea of smartness not only guides urban planning. It also surfaces in other deeply mediated arenas. In general, the most recent state of digital technologies is associated with datafication and the automatization of complex operations such as language acquisition, decision-making, or pattern recognition (Hepp, 2020). Against this background, Juho Pääkkönen, Salla-Maaria Laaksonen, and Mikko Jauho investigate the field of social media analytics. Based on interviews with analysts and clients, they show how expectations about the presumed efficacy of social media analytics help to justify increasing investments and widespread reliance. Against all evident problems, the idea of an automated analysis lends credibility to the expectation that social media analytics offer more cogent and adequate insights. It rests, the authors argue, on assumptions about social media analytics increasing the rigor of handling data, eliminating subjectivity from interpretations, and supporting a better knowledge management within those organizations that chose to adopt them. Automation then turns from a technical process into a comprehensive transformative force full of anticipations about its favorable impact.
While the future of digital media and networked technologies is not arriving automatically, automation seems to be an indispensable component in any tech forecast.
In her article, Sarah Thorne interrogates another aspect of what automation is and how it comes to matter. She looks out onto the future of commercial applications of AI in films, games, and interactive fiction. There, algorithmically generated narratives are taken up for an increasing number of formats where they have at least the potential to replace human storytelling and take their part in often collaborative creative endeavors. To do so, engineers and programmers harness vast and incongruous troves of ideas from literature, performing arts, and popular culture that are meant to teach machines how to tell good stories.
Replacing workforce with autonomously operating tools is an option. However, another even more pervasive type of human–machine configuration comes with the integration of high-tech machinery and human labor. To better unpack its formation, Christopher M. Cox analyzes the US 2017 New Collar Jobs Act and materials from IBM’s strategy to enhance professional tech work with the extensive capacities of AI-driven technology. The reinvention and conversion of how tech work will be done in the future is promoted by IBM’s commercial interests and furthered by legal provisions. This involves, as Cox explains, a redefinition of human augmentation and machinic autonomy meant to complement each other.
New kinds of digital media not only promise to shake up labor relations. As they thread through all social fields be they private or professional, they are also taken to have a deep impact on leisure activities and more domestic affairs. In this respect, Damion Sturm explores the remaking of sports fandom. In this domain, the affordances of connectivity, personalization, and customization brought by current information and communication technologies are believed to intensify the experience of sports events and the fan engagement with athletes and sports organizations. In contrast, the prospect of such interactive participation is also challenged for its intrusive commercialism and delusive technicity. Beyond these affirmative and skeptical views, the growing immersion of fans into the game blurs the boundaries between real and virtual spaces where clear distinctions into sports competitors and spectators are about to vanish.
Making digital futures
From the contributions, a couple of overarching themes emerge. We would like to highlight three of them as they pertain to future times that are digitally imagined and enabled. These are the uneven spatial distribution of future opportunities, the conservatism of data-driven projections, and the preemptive presencing of anticipated futures.
Digital futures are unevenly distributed
The future is first of all a temporal category, but one with a spatial bend. Or, in the words commonly ascribed to sci-fi author William Gibson: ‘The future is already there – it’s just not evenly distributed’. It does not rest on absolute terms or is a constant physical function that can be clearly located on a linear timeline separating the present from the past and the future (Abbott, 2001; Adam, 1995).
Actually, there cannot be a single notion of social time because temporal experiences and the ability to manage time are unevenly recognized and distributed and these inequalities also play out in space. The conjunction of spatial and temporal conditions has already been explored by Innis (1951) who assumed that media are either temporally or spatially oriented and that these biases shape how knowledge and power are dispersed or monopolized in a culture. Ideas about the spatial disparity of temporal privileges can be found in a growing body of work in social theory and geography (Fabian, 1983; Massey, 2005; May and Thrift, 2001). Even the notions of utopia or dystopia were originally terrestrial; only at the end of the eighteenth century did they shift to a temporal register (Gidley, 2017). More recently, in her work on the uneven politics of time, Sarah Sharma (2014) makes us aware of a ‘chronography of power’, that is, ‘the multitude of time-based experiences specific to different populations that live, labor, and sleep under the auspices of global capital’ (p. 9). Hence, when considering forward-looking dynamics, we should also look out for antidromic movements on which there are predicated.
A formidable place to start with is the Silicon Valley, the alleged ‘center of a progressive force for global change’ (Darrah, 2001: 4). There, often solutionist and tech-deterministic conceptions of what we do in the future, how we live, what we perceive and know about us and each other are not only envisioned but they are turned into popular technological applications and devices (Barbrook and Cameron, 1995; English-Lueck, 2017). This digital future foresees permanently connected, highly effective, mobile, and versatile individuals who inhabit comprehensive, networked infrastructures (Zuboff, 2019). As these become ubiquitous services and companions, the tech giants, startups, and entrepreneurs not only dominate Western imaginaries of a tech-rich digital future but through their widespread R&D activities and enormous market share they have an active part in making it real. This is not a recent development but goes back to the mid-twentieth century where the region became home to leading software and hardware industries (Kline, 2015; LéCuyer, 2006; Saxenian, 1994). Since then, the Silicon Valley has been a laboratory and a model where the future is already lived reality. At the same time, its products are harbingers and catalysts which help to install this ideology and lifestyle on a global scale. To be sure, this does not mean that they homogenize uneven temporalities. On the contrary, the extractive capitalistic system and working conditions that sustain the production and distribution of smartphones, computers, and all the services running on them exacerbate existing and create new inequalities that condition people’s prospects and their capacity to mold a future on their terms (Neff, 2012; Pellow and Park, 2002; Wajcman, 2019). That polychronicity is more than disparate tempos. It involves struggles about the license and ability to possess the future. This became all the more evident with the Occupy movement that also coined the slogan ‘Occupy the Future’ (Grusky et al., 2013; Urry, 2016).
Digital futures are backwards looking
To know what the future has in store for us is a perennial human desire. People at all times have made efforts to foresee and elaborate futures and to this end they have devised various methods for envisaging and assessing the certainty or the precariousness of their conjectures (Jameson, 2005). So while it is fundamentally impossible to make future-proof statements, there are numerous attempts to gain some knowledge about how things will shape up (Adam and Groves, 2007).
With the unprecedent transformation of human activities into behavioral data and advances made in analyzing them, it now seems possible to make predictions less fallible. The idea is to have plenty of data points about how people decided and how they acted and to bring them together with other available data about all kinds of natural or social phenomena so to be able to calculate more precise forecasts. These are, by nature, probabilistic in character, ‘outlining a range of possible outcomes’ (Silver, 2015: 9). Usually, their mode of foresight is the extrapolation of time series data. It assumes that there is regularity in the relevant features and that they will go on to unfold in a similar fashion (Urry, 2016). This way, the future becomes a prolongation of the past – a mode of future work that was problematic also before the fundamental disruptions of the COVID-19 crisis.
According to Shoshana Zuboff, data-driven predictions have become the defining feature of what she calls surveillance capitalism. It thrives on gathering enormous troves of behavioral information flows which are turned into prediction products that project future consumer decisions. ‘Prediction products reduce risks for customers, advising them where and when to place their bet’, Zuboff (2019) explains. ‘The quality and competitiveness of the product are a function of its approximation to certainty’ (p. 96). These insights are traded in emerging ‘markets in future behavior’ (p. 338). What is traded here is probabilistic information; it is purchased by anyone with an interest in influencing future behavior. The predictive ambition is not restricted to Silicon Valley ventures. It is a signature of modern capitalism and its temporal disposition toward the emerging future. Indeed, it seems that the capitalistic logic of thinking about the future in terms of assessable and manageable opportunities and risks has infused many other social spheres. As Appadurai (2013) postulates: ‘Economics has consolidated its place as the primary field in which the study of how humans construct their future is modeled and predicted’ (p. 286). Economic actors, but also people working and living in other areas, coordinate their decisions, as Beckert (2016) states, in anticipation of imagined outcomes. Because these are, in their entirety, genuinely incalculable, the actors become involved in ‘politics of expectations’ (p. 11) where they struggle over the distributional consequences which potentially accrue from forward-looking decisions.
One consequence of the future-oriented preoccupation in machine learning and the corporate and administrative choices relying on it is what Couldry and Mejias (2019) have named ‘a new social epistemology’ (p. 126). It is not interested in explaining why users chose to make certain decisions or acted that way and not another as long as it can predict how they will behave next time. On these terms, information scientists Weerkamp and De Rijke (2012) have declared that ‘we are not interested in current or past activities of people, but in their future plans’. Rather than uncovering underlying factors, data analytics aim at predicting results. So the sophisticated new methods eschew traditional social science and its emphasis on causal explanation and interpretation (Savage and Burrows, 2007).
The problem is that predictive models are inherently conservative (Gandy, 2000). As a matter of fact, all calculated outlooks deploy past data to foresee the future. Despite intricate algorithms and powerful computing capacity, extrapolation fails when out of sample events occur. While it can cast a plethora of probabilistic scenarios, these only have limited possibilities to account for disruption (Cheney-Lippold, 2017). All formulas must necessarily lack a thorough overview of long-term path dependence and cannot chart all changes that might interfere with linear progression. In consequence, the predictions are ‘programmed visions’, as Chun (2011) says, that ‘extrapolate the future – or, more precisely, a future – based on the past’ (p. 9).
Yet the trouble with extrapolations is not only their technical or mathematical inability to deliver precise projections. Even more disturbing is the at least implicit denial of human agency and people’s faculty to envision and enact radically alternative forms of living (Dunmire, 2005). Whereas it seems plausible to assume some sort of regularity in the patterning of human and natural process these are hardly fully determined. According to Emirbayer and Mische (1998), agency instead encloses an element of projectivity which encompasses ‘the imaginative generation by actors of possible future trajectories of action, in which received structures of thought and action may be creatively reconfigured in relation to actors’ hopes, fears, and desires for the future’ (p. 971). People are not fully trapped in social norms or cultural frameworks but can creatively respond to unfolding situations (Joas, 1997). They rarely just iterate existing protocols and even when they do so there is a chance of reflection, adjustment, or even reversion. And especially when people have little to no opportunity to navigate obligations and commitments, the counterfactual claim to provide or enlarge their agency seems imperative.
Digital futures are always already there
Digital technologies do not only forecast uncharted times or predict what comes next. They are both prognostic and progressive media: they do not await the times to come but realize the utopian as well as dystopian visions which they have always already foreseen.
With this, networked media become embedded in extensive societal endeavours to make the future foreseeable. Thus, reflexive modernization as described by Beck et al. (1994) as well as by Heller (1999) or Bauman (2000) is marked by intense and wide-ranging efforts to anticipate forthcoming developments to preemptively respond to them. These ambitions are, on the one hand, performative as visions are tied up with planning interest (Slaughter, 2003). On the other, they are paradoxical insofar as the future is open and beyond our control yet it too becomes the object of expenditures geared toward controlling it. So despite the future’s indeterminacy, the forecasts of the desirable or preventable have tangible implications for present courses of action. Decisions in the present are legitimized or contested in the light of these foresights. Recognizing the material stakes of futuristic thinking, Dunmire (2005) likewise posits that ‘a key ideological component of political discourse lies in its construction and representation of future realities and the rhetorical function those representations serve in implicating more immediate material and discursive practices and actions’ (p. 483).
In correspondence to the definition of memory as the ‘present past’ (Terdiman, 1993: 8) where bygone moments are evoked in terms of present concerns, we could speak of preemption as the ‘present future’. Since it is continually simulated to facilitate or obstruct projected paths, tomorrow is about to appear ever more quickly (Toffler, 1970). The future thus collapses into an extended present and disappears as a space of opportunity and surprise, be it nasty or pleasant (Nowotny, 1994). It becomes the field to wield ideological and political power that constraints the contingency of the future by predetermining its progress: ‘The time of the future is now’, as Urry (2016: 7) admonishes. On the same token, Hartog (2016) explains that ‘the present has thus extended both into the future and into the past. Into the future, through the notions of precaution and responsibility ... And into the past, borne by similar concepts such as responsibility and the duty to remember’ (p. 201).
Media have their share in providing and disseminating speculations about things uncertain (Ellis, 2000; Neiger, 2007). They help viewers to make sense of live events and provide guidance on how to assess the likelihood of upcoming developments. With 24/7 news, the reporting is following current affairs as they emerge and become known and through its coverage it takes an active part in driving them forward. To make observations about consequences and outcomes is a defining feature of news media. Their relevance and value stems from offering readers analyses that go beyond stating what has happened. According to Grusin (2010), this anticipatory orientation has become more pronounced after 9/11 and the call for more securitization that should also be ensured by preemption. It manifests in a heightened attention of journalistic outlets and networked media to foreseeing the future before it realizes. This ‘premediation’ acts out reality set to come. By accommodating people to a version of the future premediation ensures that when it will materialize this will not come unexpected but as the repetition of a familiar scenario. Perhaps, this surpriselessness also accounts for the popularity of hashtags like #unboringthefuture among social media users and advertisers.
The contributions of this special issue help us to elucidate these dynamics through which the future becomes colonized and commodified. They underscore that thinking about the future is fateful as it allows to exert influence in the here and now. But the articles also make clear that other futures are possible (Frase, 2016). Despite all efforts to make the future more predictable and knowable it still can be reclaimed for executing hopes and expectations that dare to depart from what is treated as inexorable including the open-endedness of future developments themselves. As this special issue suggests, potential new futures can arise when we are also able to imagine alternatives beyond today’s dominant media.
