Postdigital Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

brought on by the dependency people have on technology. The data Johnny is carrying contain the cure to NAS. During the upload, the Yakuza, working on behalf of Pharmakom, the largest pharmaceutical corporation in the world, kill the scientists and try to hunt down Johnny. While in Newark, Johnny joins up with a group of hackers who live off the grid, called LoTeks, and who, with the aid of a post-cetacean dolphin named Jones, are able to download the data, including the cure for NAS, before Johnny suffers an overload and permanent brain damage. What makes Johnny Mnemonic compelling for us is that it serves as a text for futures studies, and specifically for educational futures. In sum, futures studies are a way to anticipate, rather than predict, different futures: the probable, the possible, and the preferable. Given that we are now all too familiar with the year 2021, the movie offers a way to compare what 2021 could have been from the perspective of the time it was made (in the mid-1990s), and to marvel at how presciently it got things right for our present, as well as our futures. The movie also provides an example of how science fiction-in this case cyberpunk-imagines for us any number of futures. While much of futures studies takes place in the world of policy and proscription, turning our focus to the popular social imaginary, in the form of short stories, movies, and other media, lets us create tangible dispatches from the future (Kupferman 2020a). And when we live to see that time, as we now get to see and experience 2021, we can appreciate the ways in which these dispatches get things very wrong and very right-which in turn help us to anticipate further probable, possible, and preferable futures. Wendell Bell (1997/2003), an early voice in the theorizing of the field, suggests that futures studies is both an art and a science. Art and science, he argues, have long influenced each other, even as science seeks the truth while art is under no obligation to do so. An argument can-and should-be made in defense of art in this regard, as art often uncovers truths that science does not, or cannot, explain. And Bell also points out that 'the future is not factual' (1997/2003: 173), in that it cannot be replicated or validated. The important thing to keep in mind, it seems to me, is that there is no one way to do futures studies. I find that the more interesting approach to futures studies is to remember that it is an art. And the art upon which I prefer to draw is one we are all familiar with: science fiction. There is good theory in science fiction, and we would do well to begin using it (Kupferman 2020b). Science Is Not Acting Like Science These Days If there is one field of inquiry that would benefit from and could easily call on science fiction, it is postdigital science. While the term 'postdigital' is contested, and perhaps not even a helpful term, it describes the increasingly blurry lines of technology, media, and science as we move farther and farther away from the digital revolution of the second half of the twentieth century (Jandrić et al. 2018; Knox 2019).