Signifying the future
The recent New Republic piece on the use of fiction in counterterrorism scenarios got me thinking about the ways that media can create problems in futures thinking. The basic instinct that fiction could be useful because it gets you thinking outside the box, and lets you escape the trap of just making linear projections from the present, is right on. But serious thinking about the future also can't be complete fantasy; it needs to be grounded in fact and transparent in its assumptions.
It also can't just involve manipulating symbols of the future-- things that have come to signify "the future," and which you can either drop into forecasts for filler, or feel compelled to include because readers expect them. (Whenever I start talking about nanotechnology, for example, I worry a bit that I'm making an expected rhetorical move in a discourse about the future, not really talking about nanotechnology.)
For a good example of how problematic these images can become, consider a "covers from the future" exhibit put together by the Magazine Publishers of America. (Alas, it no longer seems the be available online.) The exhibit mocked up a set of covers from the 22nd century of today's magazines-- Seventeen, Travel and Leisure, Entertainment Weekly, Car and Driver, and others. It was trying to make the point that while lots of other things will change-- we'll have robot servants, levitating bathtubs, floors made from smart materials from Pluto-- magazines are still going to be around.
But what struck me most powerfully was that it was a virtual petting zoo of futures symbols. Almost every cover rolled out one or another technology that wasn't so much a prediction (though they may influence the way we think about the future, and may inspire some to work on particular technologies) as a Symbol of the Future-- or more specifically, a Symbol of Futurism, an flashing sign that says "thinking about the future happening here!"
The first: robots. Several cover mockups-- including People, Cosmopolitan, Time, Fortune, and Entertainment Weekly-- had robots. Specifically, buxom female robots, a la Metropolis.
Asimo, I hasten to point out, looks nothing like this.
Another recurring Symbol of the Future involved babies and science-- either babies and the double helix, or Reader's Digest's Fetus in Space collage hearkening back to the Star Child at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey (a movie whose future seems more remote than ever).
Finally, there's my all-time favorite, the personal jet pack, a technology that's been just over the horizon for forty years now.
The serious point is that these suggest just how hard thinking creatively about the future can be. Still, the appearance of these symbols should immediately call into question the appearance of anything that claims to represent the future. And yet, because they're so well-known, they've become an irresistible visual shorthand for The Future, and are likely to be with us for some time.
At least until the future actually arrives.
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