What sociodigital futures are being claimed?

This is the first of three podcasts exploring ‘Claiming Tomorrow – Sociodigital Futures in the Making.’  We are addressing the research question ‘What sociodigital futures are being claimed and made, and how, by which actors, across key areas of social life?’ Each of the three podcasts will address What, How and Who.

In this episode we hear from Debbie Watson, David Evans, Bridget Anderson and Rich Hemming as they discuss what defines futures. Futures are multiple, and we explore if they are on the way or already here. Can they be resisted or are some inevitable?'

This podcast is brought to you by the Centre for Sociodigital Futures – a flagship research centre, funded by the ESRC and led by the University of Bristol in collaboration with 12 other Universities in the UK and globally.  The support of the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) is gratefully acknowledged.

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Transcript

00:00:10 Narrator 

This podcast is brought to you by the ESRC Centre for Socio Digital Futures or CENSOF, a flagship research centre led by the University of Bristol in collaboration with 12 other universities exploring socio digital futures in the making. The support of the Economic and Social Research Council is gratefully acknowledged. 

00:00:31 Debbie Watson 

Welcome to Claiming Tomorrow, socio digital futures in the making. Episode 1. What? 

00:00:37 Debbie Watson 

I'm Debbie Watson, professor of child and family welfare. And before I introduce the panel I have with me a quick word about what we're discussing today. This podcast is one of a series of three we produce that together, explore one of the research questions we're investigating here at the centre of Social digital futures. That is what social digital futures are being claimed and made and how. 

00:00:57 Debbie Watson 

By which actors across key areas of social life. In this episode, we're going to be discussing some examples of what social digital futures are being claimed. 

00:01:07 Debbie Watson 

If you enjoy this podcast and haven't already listened to the others, you'll find these on our website along with lots of other information about our work and our research aims. 

00:01:17 Debbie Watson 

So now I have the pleasure of introducing our panel. We have three people here to talk today, so I'm going to start with Bridget Anderson, Professor of migration, mobilities and citizenship, David Evans, professor of Socio Technical Futures and Rich Hemming, senior research associate in immersive technologies. Welcome. 

00:01:37 Debbie Watson 

So this podcast is about what futures we see being claimed, but we should probably start by saying what do we mean by future? 

00:01:44 Debbie Watson 

David. 

00:01:45 David Evans 

Thanks, Debbie. So at a very basic level, the future is a time that hasn't yet happened. 

00:01:52 David Evans 

It refers to a state of affairs, for example in terms of technology, politics and economics, the ways in which people live their lives that is yet to come to pass. Now, by definition, this is hard to know. 

00:02:04 David Evans 

So it's very hard to research and to engage with, but there are very good reasons for trying, not least because the ways in which people think about and talk about the future is performative. By this, I mean it has effects in the present. If you cast your mind back a few years, a time before all the hype 

00:02:24 David Evans 

Around AI, ChatGPT and so on. All of the noise was around the metaverse. Now individuals and organizations made decisions, mobilized investments, and sought to position themselves favorably in relation to what they thought to be or in anticipation of what they thought to be the future. 

00:02:43 David Evans 

Now this links to a bigger point to borrow and to kind of ruin a phrase. The future is not a foreign country. It is not something that is completely separate from and divorced from the here and now. The future, or rather, futures plural, are always already in the making and their attention to these processes. 

00:03:05 David Evans 

For example, by looking at the claims that are made by powerful actors who have the resources to shape futures, attention to these processes gives us some clues as to what futures might be more or less likely. 

00:03:18 David Evans 

Once we have these in hand, we can start to ask questions about the challenges, issues and problems that these pose. 

00:03:25 Bridget Anderson 

Can I just pick up on that because I think, I think there's something there that's really important because you're talking about power and in when we were kind of conceiving of the centre, there was this distinction that was made between big and little futures. So as well as having multiple futures. 

00:03:46 Bridget Anderson 

We also, I think it's also helpful to think of in different in terms of different scales of future. 

00:03:53 Bridget Anderson 

And as opposed to think about, you know, big and little futures on the one hand, you've got the kind of futures of the everyday that are, you know, that we go about imagining all the time, you know, even and what am I going to have for dinner tomorrow kind of thing. But then there's also the grand scale futures. 

00:04:14 Bridget Anderson 

which often are what I think policymakers, but also advertising companies and like we're we're encouraged to imagine the big futures that are involved kind of macro level changes, including ideas of kind of technological transformation. 

00:04:32 Bridget Anderson 

So in the work that we've been doing in research on moving, we've really been looking at the futures of the borders and how those can be imagined, are imagined both in terms of is technology going to make it easier for me to cross the channel or harder, but then also. 

00:04:53 Bridget Anderson 

With this kind of vision that we're being sold about AI surveillance, how this is going to make crossings much easier, and this is actually being kind of actively leveraged by both the government and technology. So to the multiple futures, I would also add big and little. 

00:05:11 David Evans 

Absolutely. 

00:05:12 Debbie Watson 

So, Rich, you're an engineer. I'd be really interested to hear your take on this conversation. 

00:05:17 Rich Hemming 

Yeah. Fascinating. I love that concept of big and little. So yeah, thank you. I find it really fascinating in terms of looking at this through like an immersive engineering lens, just in terms of quite a lot of the futures seem to be deemed as sort of very polished or quite unrealistic. And also this notion of technology solving absolutely everything as well. 

00:05:37 Rich Hemming 

And it in fact from that. 

00:05:39 Rich Hemming 

You know, being in part of that innovation that there is this kind of inevitability of the future and that it just kind of like arrives, which I find fascinating considering working in the centre where there is more of an emphasis on responsible engineering in those design processes and actually awaken me to the idea of that engineering being part of a like a political act. 

00:05:59 Rich Hemming 

Which, from an engineering perspective has been really, really new to me and that's been fascinating to work alongside fellow researchers in an interdisciplinary manner 

00:06:07 Rich Hemming 

And of course, then asking the questions of who are these futures for and actually with technology as well, what is being hidden in these futures and black boxed and what do we know about these technologies in terms of innovation. But the research focus on the engineering on immersive side is actually in whether immersive technologies kind of open up. 

00:06:28 Rich Hemming 

Or close down these conversations around futures as well. So it's been a real hotbed of interdisciplinary conversation in the centre around these topics. 

00:06:37 Debbie Watson 

So fascinating opener and you know, we've already learned that there's not just one future, but they're really complex. So, you know, if we think collectively about what sorts of futures we're seeing being presented, are they optimistic, pessimistic, simplistic, realistic. Bridget, do you want to take that one? 

00:06:57 Bridget Anderson 

I think it kind of depends on. 

00:07:00 Bridget Anderson 

Whose future you're thinking about. And that's, I suppose that's the critical question. So it might be optimistic for some and deeply pessimistic for others that I think goes to the heart of whose future we're imagining here. And so I talked about big and little futures, and then I was thinking, well. 

00:07:20 Bridget Anderson 

Maybe it would be more helpful also to think in terms of domination and subordination. So who's in charge here and who's dominating? And I think in the work that we've been doing, we've been looking at how socio digital technology is now being proffered. 

00:07:40 Bridget Anderson 

As the solution to border crossings, by being able to combine seamlessness and security. So this is a real bugbear for policymakers because they want most people to be able to enjoy a seamless crossing. 

00:07:59 Bridget Anderson 

The problem is the whole point of a border is it's a seam. So how can you make a seam seamless? And the answer is that you make it seamless for some but not for others. So for some people the socio digital promise is a utopian one for others It's dystopian one. 

00:08:19 Bridget Anderson 

But then I think we also have to distinguish between the promise and the reality, because I think often when social digital futures are imagined, you know, we're all going to be governed by AI. 

00:08:33 Bridget Anderson 

Or whatever it is. 

00:08:35 Bridget Anderson 

It actually floats free of all of the infrastructure that is necessary to make that free floating AI, and I think you know you can see that very clearly when it comes to borders, you know, actually borders aren't just about beeping your way through. 

00:08:55 Bridget Anderson 

You know, through a border crossing there are also road and rail that gets implicated in it, for example so and that that is very fixed. And so the socio digital has to cope with that. It doesn't just stand on its own. 

00:09:10 Debbie Watson 

Thank you so much and a really big kind of example of where these futures are being imagined and represented. David, your work has been much more in the home. Would you like to talk a little bit about the kind of futures that been presented there? 

00:09:24 David Evans 

Well, so much of my work in this area has focused on the futures of television, particularly the context of digitalisation and the proliferation of digital data, devices and services. What's interesting is this feels a very far cry from what Bridget was talking about, but similar things bubble up and I want to just kind of zone in. 

00:09:45 David Evans 

on the point about seamlessness. 

00:09:48 David Evans 

So in the future, claims we looked at a very strong narrative emerges, perhaps unsurprisingly about the futures of streaming and the attendance sort of decline of broadcast or or network television. And what's interesting is the promise of seamlessness is all over this. You know, the promise. 

00:10:08 David Evans 

Which is not especially exciting or utopian, is of being able to stream content anytime, anywhere. So this does actually feel a little bit trivial to me, but I wanna highlight a couple of points here. 

00:10:22 David Evans 

The first is that if you look at the history of virtually any technology, new technologies very often come with what you might call a promissory narrative. They promise to do something in the world that will make things better for people, but at the same time this is accompanied by a sense of anxiety, criticism. 

00:10:42 David Evans 

And for want of a better term, a sort of moral panic. 

00:10:45 David Evans 

Now TV is really good for thinking about this cause throughout the history of TV, before any kind of discussion of digitalisation or everything, it's coming for quite a lot of flack. People have always kind of vilified television for dumbing people down, for damaging people's attention spans. The onslaught of mass culture, the erosion of aesthetic standards. 

00:11:05 David Evans 

And so on and so forth. 

00:11:07 David Evans 

And what's really interesting is these same kind of traits, these same ideas are basically what's being rehearsed in relation to the kind of futures of streaming, you know, think about middle class parental anxieties about screen time, for example. So what's my point here really? I think my point is that they're, you know, of course. 

00:11:26 David Evans 

Thinking there's anything much new here, but I want to go back to the point that you asked about. Are these futures realistic? Well, in a sense, I think probably is quite realistic that we could have a future of streaming content anytime, anywhere and I also think ; So what? 

00:11:41 David Evans 

I also think that these sorts of narratives, whether in modes of celebration or despair, represent something of a failure of imagination. So if I look at the kind of claims we looked at, there's a sort of overarching tendency to start from a set of assumptions which are usually quite flawed. 

00:12:00 David Evans 

Premised on the kind of big future claims rather than the sort of minutiae and, you know, complexity of little everyday futures. 

00:12:08 David Evans 

So flawed assumptions about the present situate these in a context of modest and incremental technological improvement and extrapolate the future from this. 

00:12:19 Debbie Watson 

That's really, really interesting. So what I'm hearing, sorry, Bridget, would you like to? 

00:12:23 Bridget Anderson 

Yeah. I just wanted to ask David, whether the fact that people were concerned about television using exactly the same kind of narratives and anxiety. 

00:12:34 Bridget Anderson 

Does that mean because it sounds a bit like you're saying “Ohh well, it doesn't really matter. Look, we're all fine now. You know. What were they? Were they were they were stupid to be worried about TV in the same way we'd be stupid to worry about streaming.” Is that what you're trying to say or are you making a different point? 

00:12:50 David Evans 

No, I'm definitely not trying to say that, and I don't think I'm qualified to to know or say whether we should have been worried or not about television. I should imagine the the answer is sort of. 

00:13:02 David Evans 

Somewhere in the middle of the two extremes, I think what I was trying to emphasise was the sort of sense of continuity as against, you know, this widespread sense that digital is something new. I think looking at technologies that have a sort of longer history, if you can look at what's happened. 

00:13:23 David Evans 

Around those for the advent of digitalisation, you can sort of see that I I see what you're asking me, and I don't think I have a very good answer. I think I'm just wanna point out that there was. There isn't much new in the kind of. 

00:13:35 David Evans 

Repertoires of critique or celebration that come out of this and then I think the point I was trying to get to was the one that I landed on at the end there, that it's still a failure of imagination. It's just a modest variation on wild trodden themes. So you know, in these discussions of television, you know, there isn't anything. 

00:13:56 David Evans 

Bigger going on than is it good or bad to watch content and there might be bigger questions that we ought to be considering. And I guess they come to the fore a little more in a more ostensibly political topic like borders. 

00:14:08 David Evans 

And then something is seemingly kind of mundane as television. I don't know if that answers. 

00:14:13 Bridget Anderson 

But they're still present in television, as in the same way in this mundane way, yeah. 

00:14:15 David Evans 

Yeah. 

00:14:19 Debbie Watson 

Can you bring Rich in here? I mean we're hearing about seamless technology and we're hearing about the potentials for a realistic technology. But we're also hearing about concerns in respect of inequalities. And just wondered what your perspective on on that question might be. 

00:14:34 Rich Hemming 

Thanks, Debbie. Yeah. So it's optimistic obviously, I think we touched on the point that the you know there's there, there is. 

00:14:41 Rich Hemming 

An attitude of tech will fix everything 

00:14:42 Rich Hemming 

but in terms of pessimistic as well, mentioning streaming as I think the narrative of things like Black Mirror and looking at immersive technologies being a huge part of that, that narrative, and it does seem that immersive technologies are either pitched, is really magical or really threatening. So there's this kind of huge divide. What I have noticed with working. 

00:15:03 Rich Hemming 

A lot more sociologists, and in this centre is that actually, you know, are are these technologies designed or grounded within people's lives and and actually working with the the question of what is the value of this rather than just tech for techs sake which I found really fascinating. 

00:15:20 Rich Hemming 

And I think there there are opinions of there'll be seamless automation, perfect AI and smart cities, but actually we need to be questioning who benefits, who's excluded, and and again in terms of this topsy turvy, optimistic, pessimistic, simplistic, the Metaverse hype, as you've alluded to, is is part of that as well. There's some massive. 

00:15:41 Rich Hemming 

Claims out there big claims that we are constantly checking as researchers as well. The validity of these. 

00:15:45 Rich Hemming 

Claims and in actual facts they hinge massively on access, privacy and trust. So what kind of futures are we leaning into? And for me, from an engineering point of view, we've had to hit a point of responsible engineering, but not just in terms of inclusivity in terms of ensuring that we are being inclusive. 

00:16:06 Rich Hemming 

In in that engineering, but also the way that things are being engineered as requiring a new approach in terms of the modularity, because things are moving so fast. 

00:16:13 Rich Hemming 

so responsibly engineering inclusively, but also a new form of engineering through modularity as well. 

00:16:20 Debbie Watson 

Thank you. I'm going to move us on because I think we've spoken a lot about what we see in futures claims. What about what's missing, David, would you like to kick off? 

00:16:31 David Evans 

Yeah, that's a great question, Debbie. I think one of the main things, you know, actually the main thing to come out of the work that we've done looking at TV future things is the observation that environmental considerations are pretty much conspicuous by their absence. 

00:16:48 David Evans 

And I find this deeply concerning for a number of reasons. 

00:16:53 David Evans 

First of all. 

00:16:54 David Evans 

When I think about the future and this may or may not be because I'm a parent of three young children, I cannot help but think about impending climate crises. 

00:17:05 David Evans 

Secondly, the role of technologies in accelerating or mitigating, you know whatever is going to happen must surely be a key concern for governments and their populations across the world. 

00:17:18 David Evans 

but even at a more mundane level, it really stands in stark contrast to the terms of the debate that was had around music streaming a few years ago, where environmental concerns were front and center. You know, you know, sort of argument of dematerialisation people no longer having massive record collections versus the increased. 

00:17:38 David Evans 

Amounts of data centres, so it strikes me as quite surprising and alarming that environment isn't being considered here, so going back to kind of your question earlier. 

00:17:50 David Evans 

I don't feel comfortable kind of commenting on whether we should be worried about the kind of cultural or moral effects of television content, but I feel on quite safe ground worrying about the environmental impacts of television, or indeed any other technology. And again, I think television probably feels quite. 

00:18:11 David Evans 

Perhaps trivial, quotidian, small, everyday compared to kind of global political issues and pending climate crisis. 

00:18:22 David Evans 

But I want to point out a few things here. Watching television is something that a lot of people spend an awful lot of time doing. People say they don't, but actually they do. So I think in some ways it is quite consequential. It is something that matters to people. It is also something that carries huge environmental impacts, whether in terms of. 

00:18:42 David Evans 

Energy use the materials and rare earth minerals that go into equipment. The energy and water burden of data centres and so on. And that's before we factor in the environmental impacts of producing television content. So yeah, it's a, you know, it's a major activity, it's environmentally consequential. 

00:19:01 David Evans 

If you look at the literature on resource intensive ways of life in the present, whether in relation to food, personal mobility, thermal comfort, you know heating and cooling our homes, how often we wash our clothes, really exciting stuff. But there is a really kind of strong consensus in this work that these sort of ways of life. 

00:19:22 David Evans 

I would have crept up on us. They developed incrementally. Some were probably from the post war period onward and we've been locked into them. We didn't see it coming and we weren't really thinking about climate or the environment as it happen. 

00:19:36 David Evans 

And this work also shows that these modern ways of life are historical anomalies. So what we take as normal in the here and now you know, it's a sort of historical blip maybe. 

00:19:48 David Evans 

It strikes me as ludicrous, then, that we're not learning our lesson. I think personally, environmental concerns ought to be front and centre in virtually any discussion we have about technology and the future, even though it can be challenging to measure environmental impacts, particularly when we're dealing with the unknown. 

00:20:08 David Evans 

I think that failure to consider these issues as we're seeing in the claims about the future of television is tantamount to sleepwalking into ever more resource intensive the futures. So I think we basically ignore environmental concerns at our peril. 

00:20:26 Debbie Watson 

It's a massive thing that's missing from these debates. Absolutely. What about you, rich? What do you think? 

00:20:31 Rich Hemming 

Hmm. Fascinating. Yeah. So I I come from quite a commercial R&D background. 

00:20:37 Rich Hemming 

And that was kind of technically driven for products sake with this really clean vision. So again, it's been fascinating to be around researchers and having these interdisciplinary discussions and from working with engineering projects alongside communities recently, what I've actually found abundantly clear. 

00:20:58 Rich Hemming 

is absent voices in mainstream futures, especially in the Co creation and design processes of that, and the plurality and lived experience in social digital futures, as most of these conversations are driven by people such as Facebook and Meta. 

00:21:14 Rich Hemming 

And directors or policymakers and not, and not the people who live with these technologies. So it's really completely changed my approach and the way that I look at engineering processes and Co creation is something that is very difficult and it's been great to actually, truly do this in a. 

00:21:34 Rich Hemming 

In an engineering fashion, in an iterative way. 

00:21:37 Rich Hemming 

Because with immersive technologies, there's a lot of collaborative opportunity, but quite often this is just, it's just somebody else's vision that gets realised and to answer what what is missing, I think those voices, but there there could be a... cause. It can be messy Co creation, but worthwhile and perhaps more. 

00:21:56 Rich Hemming 

Contradictory futures with lived realities, not just market leaders. Opinions driving these visions and these forces and these technologies. 

00:22:05 Bridget Anderson 

That's getting us back to big and little future. I mean, I think there's also something, you know, what you were saying about the historical blip because. 

00:22:16 Bridget Anderson 

I suppose I feel what's missing is imagination, bizarrely enough. So, on the one hand, there's lots of possibilities for imagining sort of sci-fi futures there. Actually, there's other things that are rendered completely unimaginable, and as someone that works around borders, I think it's. 

00:22:36 Bridget Anderson 

I have an appreciation of the fact that current nation state form is also a historical blip, and imagining something different. 

00:22:48 Bridget Anderson 

that's just rendered completely unimaginable. So there are ways in which then thinking about our futures, including socio digital futures, is actually very compromised by this lack of imagination because somehow we imagine that we will continue to be in nation states, nation states which are actually. 

00:23:08 Bridget Anderson 

Not very good at responding to climate change, for example, and in a market system that is also not very good at responding to these environmental questions. So we're seeing these failures in practice already being laid down and yet somehow find it difficult to begin to imagine our way out of it. 

00:23:31 Debbie Watson 

That's really interesting. So we're hearing that we lack the plurality of voices in these debates and these imaginings of futures, but we might even lack the imagination to get to that plurality of actually sharing our views. But all of this is having massive impact. 

00:23:46 Debbie Watson 

For the planet, interesting from three different perspectives, we've kind of ended up at the same point, which is absolutely fascinating. 

00:23:53 Bridget Anderson 

Maybe we have to also end somewhere a little bit more hopeful. 

00:23:57 Bridget Anderson 

Because I think there. 

00:23:58 Bridget Anderson 

Is. 

00:23:59 Bridget Anderson 

So I would say I don't know about you guys, but I would say that there is then something about you know, but we do have the capacity to imagine and we need to claim that back and we need to assert the importance of climate justice and we need to assert the importance of having these different. 

00:24:16 Bridget Anderson 

Voices and actually this is all different elements of the same actually very everyday, even if imaginative projects. 

00:24:25 Debbie Watson 

And where do we start? I mean, I'm just interested, looking at Rich, you know, why are communities not consulted by big tech companies? 

00:24:32 Rich Hemming 

I think there's there's such a barrier between those conversations. And I think what's really lovely in the centre is I think we're starting to actually make those conversations occur because the power of Co creation, doing the research and then the. 

00:24:44 Rich Hemming 

Delivery of that. 

00:24:45 Rich Hemming 

Can actually show how empowering that is and in actual fact from what we're seeing from our current research. 

00:24:50 Rich Hemming 

That those those futures are opening up conversations and actually if we go back to the value of immerse, if it is actually showing value in it. So maybe if that if that narrative can be pushed further upwards, then actually they may well look at that in a in a stronger research position and actually make it drive some of the more commercial. 

00:25:10 Rich Hemming 

Decisions. So I think the validity of what we're doing here is really. 

00:25:15 David Evans 

I also think it points to the importance of social scientists engaging with the future. So I'm a sociologist by training and inclination, and traditionally, you know, we we haven't really been in the kind of business of thinking about the future. You know, we sort of leave that to kind of technologists. Clairvoyants, fortune tellers 

00:25:35 David Evans 

and other assorted miscreants. But but I I think increasingly the sort of invitation, you know, in the literature through, you know, places like sense of, you know tells us that's not good enough. We need to take it seriously. We need to confront it and and I think in doing for that feels like an important first step. 

00:25:53 David Evans 

In confronting what Bridget you pointed out is that you know our ability to imagine it has been compromised and you know, confronting the future in this way. I think it's one way to start. 

00:26:04 David Evans 

Claiming it back a little bit. 

00:26:06 Debbie Watson 

Thank you so much. What a wonderful conversation and thank you for being part of that this afternoon. 

00:26:13 Bridget Anderson 

Thank you for having us. 

00:26:13 David Evans 

Thank you. Thanks, Debbie. 

00:26:15 Narrator 

To find out more about the centre for Socio Digital Futures, visit the University of Bristol's website, where you can read about our research, follow us on social media and sign up to our mailing list. Thanks so much for listening.