STS futures

STS perspectives on futures raise 5 questions like:

• who gets to articulate or close a future?

• when and under what circumstances?

• what are the consequences?

• who gains/who loses?

• what alternatives are hidden?

5 types of futures

• short/long term

• explicit/implicit

• positive/negative or utopia/dystopia

• verbal/nonverbal (graphs, artifacts)

• different approaches and different effects.

All futures are stories since they have (4)

• genre

• narrative/plot

• roles and obligations

• they define what is feasible and what is good.

3 questions to keep in mind

• what problem is outlined? or: what is presented as the problem to solve?

• which solutions is outlined? or: how can the problem be solved, and by who?

• how is the future brought to the present? or: how is the future conveyed to the public?

futures are performative (2)

• they can create situations of obligations

• not a description of a future reality but a change or creation of a new reality.

performative

prompts certain social actors.

all technologies give rise to expectations (2)

• that trigger requirements

• and disappointments: hype-hope cycle.

ideology: (1+2)

→ technology brings progress → ideographs:

• abstracted, ill-defined normative goals, guiding, collective commitment and behaviour.

• malleable: room for manoeuvre.

futures are political (3):

• material effects → benefits and penalties, opportunities opened and closed.

• ideological effects → wishes & desires, who is considered ‘the other’?

• futures are co-constructive of social order → they inform and reinforce each other.

futuring

attempts at shaping the space for action by identifying and circulating images of future, a process by which relationships between past, present and future are enacted.

socio-technical imaginaries

collectively held, institutionally stabilised 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.

socio-technical imaginaries, 3 M’s:

• materiality → infrastructures, technologies, institutions.

• meaning → interpretations, narratives, linked to SCOT.

• morality → ideas about what is good, right, or desirable.

4 approaches to future making according to Magnus et al/

• predictive future approaches

• plausible future approaches

• experimental futures approaches

• critcal futures approached

predictive future approaches

the future is partly predictable and must be modelled.

plausible futures approached

there are multiple possible futures; it’s all about adaptive learning.

experimental futures approached

creative exploration and co-creation of new futures.

critical futures approached

analysing how future visions emerge and the power structures associated with them

making sense of what futures (4):

• will look like → prediction

• might look like → projection & scenarios.

• could look like → opening up

• should look like → normative interventions.

what are important traditions of thinking about the future? (4)

• sociology of expectations → rational-cognitive - will something happen?

• affective futures → how do emotions and convictions play out?

• material-semiotic → is the futures already here in infrastructures and pratices?

• social order → how ought the world be organized and how does that play a role into the futures we hold?

hype-hope cycle

1. high expectations

2. hype

3. disappointment

4. stabilisation or failure.

economics of techno-scientific promises (ETP)

a regime in which promises about future science and technology are used to mobilise resources, coordinate actors, justify investments and guide innovation, even though the promised outcomes are uncertain and not yet realised.

4 promises function by Joly

• problematization = formulating a problem

• legitimation = making something appear morally or socially necessary.

• credibility = obtaining support from experts and institutions.

• irreversibility = investments establish paths that become increasingly difficult to reverse.