Obsolescence,presentification,revolution: Sociotechnical discourse as site for in fieri futures

Abstract

Spanish

French

Technological discourse constitutes a crucial resource in the process of future making and construction of new technologies. Narratives of such a discourse are characterized by projection of hopes and horrors through binary frameworks that enforce technological determinism. Sources and actors of technological discourse are multiple (the mass media, professional communities, institutions, enterprises). The article aims to identify different conceptions of technology as well as different durations of future traceable in technological discourse. On the one hand, technology appears as an autonomous, atemporal force; on the other hand, it appears split between a short and a long time frame. Whereas the short-term future is shaped by the culture of capitalism with its fast-paced consumption focused on obsolescence and presentification, the long-term future is more influenced by the binary frames recurrent in both popular media and science fiction. This long future horizon in technological discourse is concerned with the expectation of a radical revolution. It fosters scenarios where anger and desire, horror and hope coexist and compete with each other. The article proposes obsolescence, presentification and revolution as three concurrent modes of production of the sociotechnical discourse on the future.

Keywords

Future obsolescence presentification sociotechnical discourse technological determinism

Introduction

This contribution focuses on a peculiar mode of future making based on design and use of new technologies and media. Adopting the perspective of Science and Technology Studies (STS) technologies can be redefined as sociotechnical artefacts (Akrich, 1992; Bijker and Law, 1992; Bijker et al., 1994). When going beyond the idea of an autonomous, out of control technology (Winner, 1977), sociotechnical artefacts become the temporary outcomes of articulated and complex processes. Also, the future is the result of practices, representations and knowledges, emerging from the interdependencies between space, time and matter which altogether constitute what Barbara Adam (2009) named as ‘timescapes’. Sociotechnical artefacts, in this respect, materialize a complex and specific timescape in which media and technology history, rhetoric of technological imaginary, dynamics of public discourse about technology and society are involved. New technologies become communication media contended by audiences, artefacts constructed and interpreted by relevant social groups in flexible ways through cultures and methods provided by technological frames (Bijker, 1995). This becoming process is also shaped by a projective imagination and a corresponding imaginary concerning social possibilities attached to new technologies (cf. Iacono and Kling, 2001; Sturken and Douglas, 2004).

Therefore, we assume that a proper unit of social analysis of the future is sociotechnical discourse, or public discourse on technology; that means the set of written and spoken discourses, mediated or unmediated communication concerning new technologies in fieri, which allows for them to be interpreted by evoking a desirable, favourable social order (Iacono and Kling, 2001: 97). Such a discourse is characterized by narratives articulating the relationships between technologies and social actors in a spatio-temporal context. These narratives are built upon alliances, negotiations and conflicts concerning potential and possible uses of technologies.

This article argues that the future as a problem and a prospect is, in modern or postmodern society, more and more embedded and materialized through sociotechnical artefacts. In this respect, the value attributed to mobile phone and mobile technologies at large in contemporary society is exemplary.

The future shaped through sociotechnical artefacts is characterized by different durations. They depend on shorter or longer cycles according to the actors of the public discourse, degree of determinism and objectives associated with ‘typical’ social scenarios linked to new technologies. It is relevant to distinguish, in this context, artefacts which are topics of this public discourse from the (mass) media as authors and actors of the same discourse along with other social groups (from institutions to professional communities; cf. Iacono and Kling, 2001).

The article is structured as follows. After a short overview of the role played by science and technology in the social making of time, sociotechnical imaginaries are analysed with reference to the articulation of a specific future. The following dimensions are considered foundational aspects of such a future:

The resilience of a binary, oppositional scheme, where two different forms of determinism are confronted with each other when referring to future time;

Strategies of discursive and material domestication of technologies and futures attached to them, as well as the attempt to control the future through sociotechnical artefacts;

Three dimensions recurrent in the future depicted by sociotechnical discourse: obsolescence, presentification and the evocation of a revolution to be governed.

Science, technics and time

Social construction of time as a multiple and polychronic entity constitutes the point of departure of historical and sociological analysis of time itself (Adam, 1995). Over history, conceptions of time have changed, so for example four cultural forms or conceptual stages can be identified with reference to the future: future as fate, fortune, fiction and fact (Adam, 2009). However, the definition of time has changed especially in relationship to modes of knowledge accumulation and transformation, along with parallel techniques governing these modes. As Lewis Mumford pointed out in Technics and Civilization (Mumford, 1934) institutions regimenting social life (from the monastery to the army) developed standardization and mechanization of time through specific techniques and artefacts (the Benedictine hour precedes and prepares for the mechanical clock).

The relationship between science, technics and time is shaped by processes of long duration (longue durée). As Mumford noticed, space and time were transformed over the first seven centuries of machine existence; quantitative methods to study nature also allowed for measuring time on a regular basis (Mumford, 1934). On the other hand, science and technics are crucial in making a Modern World possible, based on the idea of an irreversible, irresistible Progress which obeys one-way movement rather than circularity (the motion typical of body, planets and nature). The project of a world where time is mechanical and can be exchanged as a good or commodity emphasizes the economic imperative of efficiency and efficacy, as well as the centrality of measuring time as a practice able to standardize it.

The relationship connecting time to science and technics developed during the modern age (especially through theoretical physics) and that carries on into contemporary society, which is ever more globalized because of ICT’s pervasiveness. The centrality of face-to-face social interaction to establish relations of proximity (Berger and Luckmann, 1967) is confronted with the extension of interaction beyond physical co-presence, towards mediated interaction and increased spatio-temporal accessibility (Thompson, 1995). It is far from obvious to consider face-to-face communication as the prototype of mediated communication (Fortunati, 2005): in fact, reduced distances in communication allow the expansion of personal, social, political and economic perspectives (Adam, 1995).

The flexibility of spatio-temporal horizons, as well as the plurality and ambivalence of personal, collective and social times, is reflected by our body rhythms, more and more affected by technologies (Fortunati et al., 2003). Body performativity is extended and enlarged by science, projected into a future where ethics has to face multiplicity and ambivalence of the electronic body, which is material and immaterial at once (Pellegrino, 2009).

Determinism and public discourse on technologies

Public discourse on technologies represents the relationship between science, technology and time from both a synchronic and diachronic viewpoint. At a synchronic level, at any moment or time a set of discourses associated with an emergent technology can be retrieved; at a diachronic level, public discourse on technology is persistent, so emphasizing the relevance of communication forms to imagine possible future uses of technology across history and social contexts.

Public discourse on technology is pervaded by technological and/or social determinism, an attitude or perspective projecting horrors and hopes, utopias and dystopias on new media and technologies; such determinism fosters the boundary and opposition between apocalyptic and integrated views (Eco, 1964) towards any new technology.

The question of technological determinism – ‘does technology drive history?’ as Smith and Marx (1994) put it – is part of the emergence of a modern society: ‘A sense of technology’s power as a crucial agent of change has a prominent role in the culture of modernity. It belongs to the body of widely shared tacit knowledge that is more likely to be acquired by direct experience than by the transmittal of explicit ideas’ (Smith and Marx, 1994: ix).

Notwithstanding the tacit dimension technological determinism assumes in people’s lives, there is also a discursive, narrative transmission of it, which better serves our argument in the present article: ‘The collective memory of Western culture is well stocked with lore on this theme. … The structure of such popular narrative conveys a vivid sense of the efficacy of technology as a driving force of history: a technical innovation suddenly appears and causes important things to happen’ (Smith and Marx, 1994: x).

It can be argued that the resilience of a deterministic, binary thinking characterizes the visionary, future-oriented public discourse on technology even more when popular narratives about technological innovation become hot topics for the mass media. The rhetoric of their argument is binary, deterministic and simplistic, reducing the complexity of the world.

Visions of technology have a long history of such binary thinking. The visions of technology as life-transforming, in both transcendent and threatening ways, have been embraced and reiterated again and again throughout history, from the development of the printing press to the computer … with new technologies taking the place of more established ones in a seemingly endless cycle. … While technological change continues at a rapid pace, the visions that define it remain caught within a repeating cycle of overly simplistic binary frameworks. (Sturken and Douglas, 2004: 2)

These binary oppositions inspired by a deterministic approach to technology as the sole driver of change constitute the ‘rhetoric of the new’. The temporality of this rhetoric is based upon an idea of irreversible progress, conceived as a long path where the dream of hyperconnectivity is confronted with the fear of losing strength in social relations, following an interplay between competition and cooperation (cf. Schulz, 2009). Such a rhetoric of the new is not new indeed, and the same term ‘new technologies’ has only a relative historical value. It is true that new media, including new ICTs,

… are always introduced into a pattern of tension created by the co-existence of old and new, which is far richer than any single medium that becomes a focus of interest because it is novel. … Communication is a kind of interaction which seeks variety. No matter how firmly custom or instrumentality may appear to organize or contain it, it carries the seeds of its own subversion. (Marvin, 1990: 8)

Indeed, coexistence of apparently polarized discourses in the public media debate recurs in users’ perceptions and perspectives about technology. When going into the relationship between users and technology, the either/or patterns blurs into a more nuanced, sometimes fuzzy landscape where all sorts of emotions come to be attached to the artefact as part of people’s everyday life (see Vincent and Fortunati, 2009, for the case of the mobile phone). Eventually, competition, conflict and cooperation are structured modes of interplay in the construction of digital futures (Schulz, 2009: 292).

Bads and goods are mixed together and even if a pre-technological amnesia can drive users’ narratives, giving the last and latest technology the ultimate role in everyday life, the binary oppositions of the media discourse are melted down into hybrid patterns of daily domestication (see the following section).

However, since discursive practices mainly focus on an autonomous, out of control technology (Winner, 1977) transcending the human in the good as well as in the bad, it is urgent to further enquire into discontinuities between imaginary representations and technology appropriation. Such an enquiry should not embrace the dualistic trap of deterministic public discourse. Rather, it should be inspired to a critical analysis of such a discourse, so to consider consequences and outcomes of this vision of technologies in terms of the type of future envisaged and pursued.

In fact, it could be argued that deterministic approaches, built upon binary (either/or) oppositions not supposed to be mixed up, play an analytical and also rhetorical role which is intrinsic to the logics of the mass media and the way they frame public discourse about the new (technologies). If this is the case, a call for critical deconstruction should be made in all the sites where a deterministic public discourse is performed and institutionalized.

Sociotechnical imaginaries, domestication and control of future

Visionary discourse, based on hopes and fears, utopias and dystopias (Kling, 1996), is the core of social imaginaries elicited by technoscientific innovations. This happens even more when the technology in question is devoted to mediate communication, social interaction, information and knowledge circulation. Visions carried out by this discourse participate in processes of domestication and control through which users ‘transport’, adopt and appropriate the media in their everyday life (Silverstone, 1994). According to Silverstone, home is a mediated space where taming of objects is done through material and symbolic work, bringing them from the wild to familiar contexts of meaning. Following the most recent versions of domestication theory (Berker et al., 2006), the passage from a state of wildness to one of familiarity, intimacy and domesticity of technology can happen out of the domestic space of the household. However, this space constituted the crucial observatory of early domestication theory. Domestication of a sociotechnical future is contextualized in the spaces and times of circulation of the different discourses about technology.

We want to argue that this future has different durations, through which technology is made familiar and domesticated by users. In this way it is controlled and tamed, drawing on topics and times of the imaginary.

Dreams and fantasies created, exchanged and reworked in the public forum … develop their own traditions in the conversation society has with itself about what it is and ought to be. … They reflect conditions people know and live in, and real social stakes. (Marvin, 1990: 8)

There is a short-term future, obsolescent and presentified, but also a future that can have a longer time horizon. The latter is constructed through binary frameworks to envisage a revolutionary, farther perspective.

No matter the duration of the future, discourses concerning a new technology play a strategic role, constituting the public forum in which different social groups negotiate and conflict on their own interpretations, expectations and potential uses of technology (Bijker, 1995). The ‘game’ concerns the power to decide who has (not) voice, and the power to build up alliances and heterogeneous assemblies able to become obligatory passage points for as many actors as possible (Latour, 1989). Media history as history of expected, potential and current uses of the media, shows how a technical and professional community can exploit the social imaginary related to an emergent technology. This process allows the community to legitimate itself as main keeper of competencies and future actions for technology development (see the case of electricity and electric communication at the end of the nineteenth century in Marvin, 1990).

Material and discursive strategies aimed at integrating technology into everyday life always control and orient their potential future uses, when transforming what appears to be unknown, far and wild into something known and familiar. The known and the unknown are deeply intertwined in the imaginary dimension of visionary discourse which gives birth (and name) to the new. Imagination has fostered innovation since the Middle Ages, when contamination between magic, science and technics constituted the seeds for the early scientific laboratory (Mumford, 1934: 28ff.). This creative, performative dimension characterizes the making of the future. Future making has a long history of attempts and efforts to know the unknown and make transparent the opaque. Knowing the future has always involved developing a specific know-how, knowledge practices and thinking on a long-term horizon, aimed at either colonizing the future or – sometimes – to erase the possibility of a future for the next generations (Adam, 1995). The paradox of science and technology is the attempt to refine the process of knowing and understanding the future (e.g. scientific forecasts, trend analysis and so on) while making conditions of this knowledge more and more complex. Unexpected paths of transformations, drifts and speed of change are even more complicated by the perception that the future is already behind us, already passed and, to some extent, belonging to the past (Adam, 2006a).

Obsolescence, presentification and revolution, traced as follows, point out the contradictions of present futures, namely the future prospects of the present. Decision-making processes are set up in order to make these prospects likely to happen (Luhmann, 1982: 281), by means of discourses which depict the future as at hand here and now, so partaking in an extended present oriented towards a revolution which must be governed.

Obsolescent future

Variety and duration of social ties, as well as of material and symbolic objects, change over time, but they have particularly shrunk in modern and, especially, postmodern capitalism. Such a trend is reflected by an unprecedented obsession with consuming and changing. Notably, obsolescence of ephemeral artistic forms (Dorfles, 1987: 144) seems to be shared by those cultural objects (Griswold, 2008) aimed at mediating daily practices, communication and social interaction. From a constructivist perspective, many technological artefacts become commodities in the stage of their relative stabilization (Bijker, 1995). Innovation cycles in the globalized time are subject to an ever greater rapid acceleration, obeying life cycles highly fragmented by continuous updates or variations, conceived of as further improvements of the artefact.

The other side of the coin of this continuous update is the obsolescence of forms, their temporary sacralization in the name of a symbolic and aesthetic value which makes technological artefacts ‘cult objects’, embodying not only a functional but also a symbolic and emotional value (Vincent and Fortunati, 2009). The mobile phone is, very likely, the most known and contemporary of these cultural objects shaped by incremental innovation aimed at varying their forms and functions. The correspondence to this material obsolescence is the temporal feature of public discourse which depicts a technology ‘of a near future’. This discursive form is vague and ambiguous, very close to fad cycles. It obeys phases of expansive diffusion from a rhetorical and discursive viewpoint, which not always are translated into material and concrete outcomes.

Examples of such a dynamics can be retrieved from the 1980s and 1990s with reference to the popularity of teleworking as a key model for reorganization of work (Iacono and Kling, 2001); buzzwords like cloud computing, ubiquitous computing, nanotechnology have marked the scene over the past decade. The search for the next keyword to launch on the market seems to occupy, in this way, the headlines of popular (but also specialized) magazines as well as the energies of marketing people, engaged in setting the next trend in terms of a discursive innovation of the technological arena.

Presentification of future

Obsolescence of the sociotechnical future is coupled with a compression of this future time in the ‘here and now’ dimension, the current state of things. As stated by the advert of a major mobile phone provider, ‘life is now’: the future is already here, made present and ready to hand in the latest technological artefacts. In fact, it is the determinism of sociotechnical imaginary which frames technology out of space and out of time, in a present time which is extended (Nowotny, 1994) and continuous (Urry, 2002). To some extent, technology is part of an ahistorical space, an ‘out there’ which is out of time, void of temporal connotations. These characteristics, reinforced by specific technological visions (Winner, 1977) are even more pronounced because of the globalization of time (Adam, 1995). Such a temporality is simultaneous and instantaneous, enabled by the synchronic temporality of ICTs. Furthermore, it is extended, as it results from the distantiation of space and time of mediated communication (Thompson, 1995); in a paradoxical way, the time embedded into mediated communication becomes closer and closer to face-to-face, especially in forms of proximity at a distance and intermittent proximity linked to contemporary multiple mobilities (Pellegrino, 2011; Urry, 2002, 2007).

The shrinking of future into a shorter time span – what is termed here as ‘presentification’ of future – is coupled with its obsolescence and above all impedes individual and collective actors to embrace long-term perspectives. On the other hand, marginality of long duration is emphasized by fragility of expert systems (Giddens, 1990), as well as reinforced by institutions involved in the governance of the so-called ‘New Capitalism’ (cf. Sennett, 2006). They make it evident how the future taken into consideration is very short termed, a horizon marked by the global crisis of financial markets and focus on the ‘here and now’, so excluding those ‘politics of posterity’ (Adam, 2006b) which should instead be pursued in order to keep the prospect of a future alive for future generations.

Future, technologies of freedom and revolution

The potential of transformation of new technologies is characterized by deterministic, fast changing and sometimes violent atmospheres, where fear and anxieties of human incapacity to control technology are opposed to paradises where action is freed from constraints and norms. Changes attached and attributed to new technologies appear to be total, radical transformations typical of revolutions, therefore able to change the course of history (Arendt, 1963). In this respect, the expectation of a supposed revolution determined or driven by new ICTs and scientific or technological evolution is a foundational characteristic of the sociotechnical discourse on the future.

Since revolutions reconcile the idea of liberty with the principle of a new beginning (Arendt, 1963), technologies and their revolutionary potential question the idea of freedom as such, bringing about, as the ultimate aim, liberation. Notwithstanding the intentions, outcomes of revolution can be highly controversial, and not always do they bring about a substitution for the previous order (namely, of old technologies/media). From an etymological viewpoint, revolution is the motion of planets, in particular the movement of rotation of the earth on its own axis. This movement is cyclical, periodical and pre-ordered. It is not by chance that originally the word ‘revolution’ corresponded, politically, to attempts at ‘restoration’ (Arendt, 1963). Such an ambivalence of the term confirms that integration, rather than substitution, can occur when new technologies appear on the scene, in spite of the expectation of radical change pursued in the present future (e.g. ‘digital natives’ and their presumed break with past generations). Again, conflict and cooperation (cf. Schulz, 2009) confirm themselves as crucial modalities of the construction of digital futures.

On the other hand, the sometimes radically conservative dimension of technological revolutions can end with threatening fundamental liberties conquered through the classical historical revolutions, the French and the American ones.

‘And so, as speech increasingly flows over those electronic media, the five century growth of an unabridged right of citizens to speak without controls may be endangered’ (De Sola Pool, 1984: 1). These are words written well before the crucial centrality of networking technologies and the Internet. These information technologies make protection of freedom an imperative for both sociotechnical discourses and practices, especially when outcomes of revolution reveal themselves as ambivalent and ambiguous.

Concluding remarks

Public discourse on technology represents a crucial arena to understand the future. Not the future forecast by wizards or fortune tellers, not anymore a future gifted to humans by gods whose goodness makes the future a fortune (Adam, 2006a). Rather, the future envisaged in sociotechnical discourse is totally human, controllable by reason of this humanness and pursued by means of sociotechnical artefacts which mediate and change communication, interaction and practices. In this respect, sociotechnical discourse is a site where in fieri futures can be observed and retrieved, futures imagined in the present as well as in the past, by accessing the resource of projective imagination which attaches horrors and dreams of freedom, novelty, rebirth to new technological artefacts.

Sociotechnical discourse elicits the future in the making; however, this future under construction is confined and constrained by this same discourse in an extended present where a revolution that has already happened is pursued through obsolescent artefacts, be they (buzz)words, devices, or goods to be consumed as fast as possible.

Can we overcome the determinism which inspires and orients public discourse on technology? How can longer term futures be implemented in current decision-making processes in order to go beyond the risk of presentism which prevents us from taking on responsibilities for the future outcomes of our present actions?

A critical as well as ethical exercise is required, in order to separate the new and the unknown (which is partly the not yet), from ancient, comfortable oppositions supporting popular narratives of technological futures and the correspondent sociotechnical discourse. An ethics of technological vision is needed, in order to take into account by and for whom sociotechnical futures are firmly constrained into binary frameworks where foundational drivers (hope and fear) are continuously elicited.

From design to policy-making, crossing over the multiple contexts of daily use(r)s, various actors contribute to sketch timescapes of and by new technologies. The outcome is a variety of different futures in the making, resulting from the interaction of discursive and material contexts of technological construction. To guarantee a pluralism (and multiplicity) of technological visions, preventing long-term sight to be caught in the trap of obsolescence, is a mission that ethics and politics of technology innovation should at least attempt. In this respect, values involved in the shaping of alternative futures by transnational global movements (Schulz, 2011) constitute a possible point of departure to foster different approaches and discourses where new technologies can open up further horizons/modalities, going beyond obsolescence, presentification and revolution as depicted in this article.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank two anonymous reviewers for their encouraging and constructive comments and Ian Robinson for his contribution to the article’s readability.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Author biography

Giuseppina Pellegrino teaches sociology of culture and communication at the Department of Sociology and Political Sciences at the University of Calabria (Italy). Her research interests concern science and technology studies, new media and technology design; gender and media stereotypes in public and political communication; and cultural and media studies. She has been a visiting fellow at the Universities of Edinburgh, Lancaster (UK), Graz-Klagenfurt and Darmstadt, Erasmus Visiting Teacher at Erfurt and Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Italian Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. She has edited The Politics of Proximity: Mobility and Immobility in Practice (Ashgate, 2011).

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