Thinking with Monsters

Optimistic instrumentalism dominates the narratives and discourse(s) that attend recent technology advances. Most future-studies methods in current use depend on projecting properties, processes, facts or conditions of the present into the future. Absent is substantive engagement with the human condition and day-to-day life such technological futures entail. To critique the dominant discourse on future worlds, we offer thinking with monsters to disclose ‘living-with-technologies’ and the social, political, and economic alternatives to the optimism that pervades our rational instrumentalism. We argue that shifting the focus away from facts and towards matters of concern engenders a critical voice that enables participation in research that produces the (future) worlds that we seek to explain and understand.

[1]  Sohail Inayatullah,et al.  From ‘who am I?’ to ‘when am I?’ , 1993 .

[2]  Richard A. Slaughter,et al.  Futures Studies as an Intellectual and Applied Discipline , 1998 .

[3]  Zygmunt Bauman,et al.  Utopia with no Topos , 2003 .

[4]  Cameron Tonkinwise,et al.  How We Intend to Future: Review of Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming , 2014 .

[5]  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.  Frankenstein: Annotated for Scientists, Engineers, and Creators of All Kinds , 2017 .

[6]  Ioanna D. Constantiou,et al.  New games, new rules: big data and the changing context of strategy , 2015, J. Inf. Technol..

[7]  Jeannett Martin,et al.  Reading Science: Critical and Functional Perspectives on Discourses of Science , 1998 .

[8]  Marie Griffiths,et al.  Science fiction prototypes: Visionary technology narratives between futures , 2013 .

[9]  Robin R. Murphy,et al.  Beyond Asimov: The Three Laws of Responsible Robotics , 2009, IEEE Intelligent Systems.

[10]  Cathy O'Neil,et al.  Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy , 2016, Vikalpa: The Journal for Decision Makers.

[11]  Hubert L. Dreyfus,et al.  Disclosing New Worlds: Entrepreneurship, Democratic Action, and the Cultivation of Solidarity , 1997 .

[12]  A. Pickering.  The mangle of practice : time, agency, and science , 1997 .

[13]  Andrew Feenberg,et al.  Book Symposium on Andrew Feenberg’s Between Reason and Experience: Essays in Technology and Modernity , 2010 .

[14]  Maria Beville,et al.  The Unnameable Monster in Literature and Film , 2013 .

[15]  Michael S. Carolan,et al.  Ontological Politics: Mapping a Complex Environmental Problem* , 2004, Environmental Values.

[16]  C. Bacchi.  Why Study Problematizations? Making Politics Visible , 2012 .

[17]  F. Geels.  Processes and patterns in transitions and system innovations: Refining the co-evolutionary multi-level perspective , 2005 .

[18]  N. Brown,et al.  Contested Futures: A Sociology of Prospective Techno-Science , 2000 .

[19]  E. M. Forster,et al.  The Machine Stops , 1909 .

[20]  Paul Dourish,et al.  The stuff of bits: exploring the materialities of information in interaction , 2017, EICS.

[21]  Paul Dourish,et al.  The Stuff of Bits: An Essay on the Materialities of Information , 2017 .

[22]  Linda Schele,et al.  Maya Cosmos: Three Thousand Years on the Shaman's Path , 1995, Cambridge Archaeological Journal.

[23]  Bernd Carsten Stahl,et al.  What Does the Future Hold? A Critical View of Emerging Information and Communication Technologies and Their Social Consequences , 2011, Researching the Future in Information Systems.

[24]  Hyeonju Son,et al.  The history of Western futures studies: An exploration of the intellectual traditions and three-phase periodization , 2015 .

[25]  M. Callon.  Struggles and Negotiations to Define What is Problematic and What is Not , 1980 .

[26]  Martha S. Feldman,et al.  Designing routines: On the folly of designing artifacts, while hoping for patterns of action , 2008, Inf. Organ..

[27]  Brian Rappert,et al.  Sensing Absence: How to See What Isn’t There in the Study of Science and Security , 2015 .

[28]  Ulrike Schultze,et al.  What kind of world do we want to help make with our theories? , 2017, Inf. Organ..

[29]  Wiebe E. Bijker,et al.  Of Bicycles, Bakelites, and Bulbs: Toward a Theory of Sociotechnical Change , 1995 .

[30]  B. Latour.  Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern , 2004, Critical Inquiry.

[31]  Stephen Crook.  Minotaurs and other Monsters: `Everyday Life' in Recent Social Theory , 1998 .

[32]  Jenifer Sunrise Winter,et al.  Philosophical foundations for informing the future(S) through IS research , 2018, Eur. J. Inf. Syst..

[33]  Will Venters,et al.  Journey to DOR: A Retro Science-Fiction Story on Researching ePrescribing , 2011, Researching the Future in Information Systems.

[34]  A. Feenberg.  The critical theory of technology , 1990 .

[35]  Anthony Dunne,et al.  Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming , 2013 .

[36]  Shoshana Zuboff,et al.  Big other: surveillance capitalism and the prospects of an information civilization , 2015, J. Inf. Technol..

[37]  J. Naisbitt.  Megatrends: Ten New Directions Transforming Our Lives , 1982 .

[38]  J. Urry.  What Is the Future , 2016 .

[39]  Kenisha Garnett,et al.  Delivering sustainable river basin management: plausible future scenarios for the water environment to 2030 & 2050. Report B: Full Scenarios , 2017 .

[40]  Judy Kay,et al.  Actors, Avatars and Agents: Potentials and Implications of Natural Face Technology for the Creation of Realistic Visual Presence , 2018, J. Assoc. Inf. Syst..

[41]  D. Suvin.  Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre , 1979 .

[42]  T. Ingold.  Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description , 2011 .

[43]  Charles Taylor.  Modern Social Imaginaries , 2002 .

[44]  Carl Freedman.  Critical Theory and Science Fiction , 2000 .

[45]  Yvonne Sell,et al.  Leadership 2030: The Six Megatrends You Need to Understand to Lead Your Company into the Future , 2014 .

[46]  Francesca Rochberg,et al.  The Heavenly Writing: Divination, Horoscopy, and Astronomy in Mesopotamian Culture , 2004 .

[47]  Jamer Hunt,et al.  Prototyping the Social: Temporality and Speculative Futures at the Intersection of Design and Culture , 2017 .

[48]  S. Jasanoff,et al.  Dreamscapes of Modernity: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Fabrication of Power , 2015 .

[49]  Margunn Aanestad,et al.  Information Systems Innovation Research: Between Novel Futures and Durable Presents , 2011, Researching the Future in Information Systems.