Chapter 1: Digital Futures

Digital Futures

Brave New World v 1984. In 1984, total control over the exploited population is maintained through surveillance, terror and the fear of terrible punishment; in BNW control, no less totalitarian, is exercised through 'the more effective methods of reward and scientific manipulation' of individual minds. In both books the entire population is under constant surveillance and the methods of ideological manipulation are similar - the mass media play a central role in disseminating the regimes' propaganda. In 1984 it was the telescreen: a 2-way mechanism for instruction and surveillance that could never be turned off, while in BNW it was 'non-stop distractions of the most fascinating nature'. Huxley's conclusion based on observations of English society in the 1950s: 'A society, most of whose members spend a great part of their time ... in the irrelevant other worlds of sport and soap oepra, of mythology and metaphysical fantasy, will find it hard to resist the encroachments of those who would manipulate and control it'.

Contradictions apparent in new media technologies. On one hand, they hold the promise of a bright, abundant future; on the other is the threat of increased surveillance, even greater monopoly over resources, and greater control over our political selves-our citizenship.

Keeping up with the future

Mobile phones are no longer just phones-they are GPS tracking devices, video and still cameras, wireless Internet connections, and pocket calculations. In the US all mobiles are now fitted with GPS. Is technology moving too fast?


The process of convergence-the melding of one technology with another-produces a range of new hybrid technologies that can either make our lives easier, or as Huxley and Orwell warn, lead to a nightmare future of more effective social manipulation and control.



Kingsley Amis New Maps of Hell - writtenin 1960 when promise of a bright tech-driven future was real, though overshadowed by the Cold War. He suggested that modernist sci-fi often portrayed human society 'groaning in chains of its own construction'.



In a techno-positivist vein, some scientists are predicting that future technologies will make it possible to radically re-engineer human DNA to 'blend ourselves with machines in unprecedented ways ... ranging from homogenised humans to alien-looking hybrids bred for interstellar travel'.



The techno-positivist future relies on the argument that tech somehow equals 'progress' and that once we've ironed out a few difficulties-like inequality of access-the world can look forward to eliminating the social ills of poverty, war and pestilence. Aus govt's strategic framework document for the 'information economy' is clearly in the utopian camp, asserting that successful adjustment to the new techs will 'create a platform for long-term national competitiveness, the renewal of regional communities and stronger social cohesion'.



In this future, the convergence that produces digital comms technologies is seen as a process that can expand democracy and shrink the world to what Marshall McLuhan called the global village.

The alternative future is less ideal. Increasing role that digital techs play in everyday lives doesn't lead to abundace and world peace. Instead moves us inexorably towards a totalitarian world state, in which divisions b/w wealthy and poor are as wide as ever and tech enslaves us to the machine. Dig techs move from being comm-oriented to surveillance-oriented.

Either future is possible. Technologies don't exist in a vacuum; they are imagined, invented, and implemented in an imperfect world of inequality and social divisions.

The type of future we leave will not be determined by the tech itself, but by the legacy of the social conditions in which these techs are developed and exploited. Technology itself-as a series of intersecting scientific methods, discoveries, and practices, often embodied in 'things'-has no inherent social values. Reverse is true: the values of the dominant societies on earth will shape the ways in which comm techs and practices of the present and in the future are invented, distributed, consumed and controlled.

Broadcast to Narrowcast: The age of mass broadcasting (incl print publishing) is perhaps coming to an end. Instead we are looking at a future of mass comm that involves highly targeted narrowcasting-the mass audience is split into its individual (atomic) particles, the single receiver-consumer. The first widely available tech that began the seismic shift was the Internet. The mobile phone and the digital set-top box are the latest and perhaps more important techs that cement in place the narrowcasting future.

Dialectical method and a philosophical outlook that asks us to examine the interconnected and contradictory elements of tech as they exist in a social context. The dialectic is found in nature, but is also a driver of social change. It is a clash of ideas, and a clash of social forces. More fundamentally it is the clash of social forces with the forces of nature. Alex Callinicos: the need to control nature through the implements created by technology is a constant in the history of hte human species. All human societies, from the primitive cave dwellers of the Stone Age to the sophisticated urbanites of the 21st-C sprawl, have harnessed nature in order to produce the means of their own social reproduction.