Future Imaginaries In The Making And Governing Of Digital Technology: Multiple, Contested, Commodified

• In Event: Lost in the Dreamscapes of Modernity? Theorizing Agency, Multiplicity, and Scale in Sociotechnical Imaginaries 2

Abstract

This paper is a conceptual contribution to the ongoing diversification of the notion “sociotechnical imaginaries” (SIs) in the context of digital technologies. Technology companies and political institutions dig into the rich pool of narratives, visions, and values to support their services, products and regulations. Building on an extensive literature review and illustrating its findings with case studies investigating the making and governing of digital technologies, this contribution will show that the initial focus of the notion SIs as monolithic, linear future trajectories primarily enacted by state actors needs to be refined and extended. We will particularly highlight three aspects in our talk:

(1) Multiple: SIs often appear to be multiple. Based on our analysis, we will demonstrate that the circulation of single imaginaries is the exception, not the rule. Studying digital futures hence involves tracking the trajectories of multiple imaginaries and their relation to one another.
(2) Contested: Imagined futures are seldomly consensually defined. The study of imaginaries of digital technology further involves the investigation of more or less explicit controversies and struggles over dominance.
(3) Commodified: Corporate actors have become key agents of imaginaries who attire their products and services in utopian visions of the future. Negotiating digital futures thus finally implicates tendencies of commodification of sociotechnical imaginaries.

We conclude with discussing that sociotechnical imaginaries increasingly figure as multiple, contested and commodified in digital realms due to powerful technology companies that not only take over the imaginative power of shaping future society, but also partly absorbing public institutions’ ability to govern these very futures with their rhetoric, technologies and business models. In that way, an advanced concept of SIs also contributes to the prominent debate on platform governance and private ordering.

Authors

• Christian Katzenbach, Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society (HIIG)

• Astrid Mager, Austrian Academy of Sciences