Thinking non-technologically about tech futures

So, Steve Jobs presented several new Apple products on September 1 and, seemingly, everyone blogged about it in realtime. If you’re excited about “Ping,” so much the better. My concerns are with those of us in academics who are interested in the future of social technologies. Maybe we weren’t typing up vaguely obsequious blog entries about Jobs’s presentation, but we were still watching. Why? Well, isn’t it obvious? To track the next developments and, accordingly, gain some sense of our emergent, human future.

But the problem is, when academics take their cues from product developers, their own theories begin to bear an eerie resemblance to advertising. Indeed, much of the theorizing around media technologies resembles hyperbolic advertising copy. Our mobile devices are supposed to:

Utterly disconnect us from space. Not only are social media supposed to bring together things (and people) distributed across space, they also promise to turn one kind of space (public) into another kind of space (private). It’s not supposed to matter where you are.

Annihilate boundaries. All of the temporal/spatial boundaries that order our daily rounds (home/work/school/leisure) are going to bleed into each other until there is no longer any sharp distinction between having fun with friends and, say, attending classes.

Isolate people from each other and the world. By “cocooning” people in media worlds of their own devising, much of the complexity of the world around them will disappear, replaced by a homogeneous “non-place” of ubiquitous, media distraction.

To a certain extant, we can find multiple examples of each of these around us today. That student, for example, who takes a break from facebooking in her dorm room to come to my class and facebook. It’s not much of a stretch to imagine a time when there is simply no qualitative difference between sitting in the dorm room and sitting in the classroom.

At the same time, this kind of extrapolation really fails to grapple with real change to real lives. Since they are premised on projections about particular technologies (rather than on projections about lives in a world with those technologies), all they really tell us about are the hopes or fears people have about particular media today. Arid theorizations like “annihilate boundaries” really tell us nothing about how people actually live and, indeed, used often enough, these formulations soon mean nothing at all.

I have found it more useful to start prognosticating from the other end by thinking of specific situations. You’re interested in a group of people, and you would like to get into situations where you would have a chance to know them better. Or, conversely, there’s someone you’re constantly meeting that you’d rather distance yourself from. How do you go about that? Or, there’s someone that you know a little, but you’d like to ask them a favor. How?

It’s no mistake that these are all classic, social network problems—we’re talking about social media, after all. But, more than that, these specific social actions take us beyond any one technology—now, we’re talking about social relations, specific spaces, forms of communication. The assumption here is that if, as we anticipate, life will change, then start from that broader context, rather from the technologies that may enable it. This means we’re looking at the whole fabric of communities and urban life. This also forces us to look at cultural specificity—forming friendships and asking favors is different in, say, Seoul than in my hometown of Dubuque, Iowa: different expectations, different obstacles and, even, different outcomes.

Of course, the trick here is that these social actions are themselves dynamic. Indeed, people in the future may be faced with all kinds of social problems (and possible solutions) that we can hardly anticipate today. To me, that’s the most exciting part—something that we miss if we limit ourselves to fetishizing the next, newest technologies.