Models and Metaphors: engaging the question of the future

ICTs in the Contemporary World seminar, 3 - 5 pm, 21 November 2005, Studio Ciborra.

Harmeet Sawhney, Department of Telecommunications, Indiana University, Bloomington, USA

Scholars have tended to shy away from the question of the future because it sits uneasily with norms of rigorous research. However, in the rapidly changing IT arena, corporations, regulators, and courts must act today in anticipation of the future. They need images of the future, even if they are not perfectly reliable, to guide their actions in the present.

If we do not help form these images, the mind space of influential actors will be filled by the imaginations of the pop-futurists. While we cannot get into the business of making predictions, we can work to enhance the way the future is thought about.

In my presentation I will talk about two efforts in this direction. One, developing heuristic models that generate historically informed thinking about the future. I will show how a model derived from the experience with canal, railroad, highway, telegraph, and telephone networks anticipated critical turns in the development of Wi-Fi technology.

Two, understanding how collectivities imagine the future, especially via the use of metaphors. I will use examples from radio and internet history to show how scholars can influence the use of metaphors at the embryonic stage of a technology, when its would-be architects are confused about its future and the vested interests are not yet hardened, and thereby influence its development.

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