Abstract
Visions of the future predict spaces apparently teaming with ever more novel and pervasive technologies. Significant amongst such forecasts is the notion of ‘ubiquitous computing’ (ubicomp), understood as an affordance or capacity tied (in)to people, places and things. This article stages an encounter between the futurity of ubicomp and recent debates in geography around anticipation. So, first, the future orientation in ubicomp research and development (R&D) is investigated as a mode of anticipation. ‘Knowledges’, and ‘logics’ of anticipation are subsequently, and second, discussed as the conceptual apparatus that constructs and perpetuates the ‘proximate future’ of ubicomp. This analysis connects recent discussion about ‘anticipation’ in social sciences research with the methods of ubicomp research, which fits with an emergent agenda around futurity in human geography. Third, the conceptual articulation of ‘anticipatory logic’ is applied to the analysis of empirical investigations of ubicomp R&D to identify the specific logics of anticipation at play. This article accordingly examines the logics of anticipation that both support and destabilise the certainty with which the future is imagined within ubicomp. In conclusion, the multiple ways of anticipating a future world and the ways in which they discipline understandings of futurity are framed as a politics of anticipation.
Highlights
‘The best way to predict the future is to invent it’ — Alan Kay, Senior Engineer, Xerox Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC), 1971
The empirical basis of this paper is a set of interviews conducted during July and August 2008 in Silicon Valley, California, with a range of people involved in the research and development (R&D) of ubicomp
In the final section of this article I signal how these logics rationalise a discourse of futurity, which raises to the fore a politics of anticipation
Summary
‘The best way to predict the future is to invent it’ — Alan Kay, Senior Engineer, Xerox PARC, 1971. The ‘arrival’ or making-present of this future, Bell and Dourish (ibid.) suggest, has been somehow missed, ostensibly because it is not as clean and ordered, instead it is ‘messy’ It is on this point that our analysis parts ways, because I argue, following Massumi (2007a, 2007b), that anticipation remains as such and, propagates itself. ‘‘Knowledges’, and ‘logics’ of anticipation are subsequently, and second, discussed as the conceptual apparatus that construct and perpetuate the ‘proximate future’ (Bell and Dourish, 2007) of ubicomp This analysis connects recent discussion about ‘anticipation’ in social sciences research with the methods of ubicomp research, which fits with an emergent agenda around futurity in human geography. The multiple ways of anticipating a future world and the ways in which they discipline understandings of futurity are framed as a politics of anticipation
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