{"id":1220,"date":"2012-05-04T11:47:39","date_gmt":"2012-05-04T11:47:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/simoningsmirror.wordpress.com\/?p=411"},"modified":"2012-05-04T11:47:39","modified_gmt":"2012-05-04T11:47:39","slug":"start-the-week-explores-the-digital-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/?p=1220","title":{"rendered":"Start the Week explores the digital future"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Listen on Monday morning to Radio 4: you\u2019ll find the wild and wonderful writer Nick Harkaway, design guru Anab Jain, business expert Charles Arthur and myself discussing the digital future with Andrew Marr<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Arc<\/em>, New Scientist’s new digital quarterly of futures and science fiction<\/a>, regularly darkens the hand towels at Anab\u2019s outfit Superflux as we prepare a year of events, interventions, pop-up surprises and generally making things up. Nick Harkaway, on the other hand \u2013 well, you\u2019ll have to wait till Monday to find out what we\u2019re up to with him<\/em>. Even Charles Arthur is formerly of the New Scientist<\/em> (and the Independent<\/em>, during Andrew Marr\u2019s stint there in the late 1990s).<\/p>\n

I think some of this lack-of-separation set alarm bells ringing somewhere because the show\u2019s producer rang us all beforehand telling us not to be nice to each other. (Face to face, it\u2019s the obvious thing to do; on air, it\u2019s an excruciating waste of the listener\u2019s time.)<\/p>\n

This got me thinking about how we behave on different media. Susan Greenfield\u2019s belief that we\u2019re all going to hell in a handcart because of our love of new media has become the stuff of parody and legend<\/a>; still, she\u2019s on to something. We learn to behave differently as we engage through different media; we develop new responses, new forms of interaction \u2013 even new ethical codes. Not all of these have to be pretty.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a stalwart reader \u2013 or an obtuse one \u2013 who takes much comfort from Charles Arthur\u2019s new book Digital Wars: Apple, Google, Microsoft and the Battle for the Internet<\/a>. The pace at which the digital economy is deskilling the workforce is breathtaking: the very idea of \u201cdigital commerce\u201d is being called into question as the number of serious players on the web falls toward single figures. The internet doesn\u2019t like democracy. The internet doesn\u2019t want to be free. The internet wants to be a vertical monopoly. It wants to be Hollywood, circa 1930. Or, just possibly, something worse.<\/p>\n

Nick Harkaway thinks we can still harness this grinning Stalinist golem to our own humble, human needs. The Blind Giant: Being Human in a Digital World<\/a> is his attempt to resuscitate the idea of the internet as a civic space. Myself, I think the tide is against him, but he makes a hell of a splash.<\/p>\n

Anab is a designer, entrepreneur, TED Fellow and founder of Superflux<\/a>, a multidisciplinary design company. (I guess you need a CV of that sort if you want to be profiled in both Popular Science<\/em> and Marie Claire<\/em>.) It\u2019s Superflux\u2019s job to realise ideas about the future in props, videos, stories and working models. Superflux designs everything from mechanical bees to prosthetic vision systems for the blind, seeing these concepts through from drawing board to real-world trials. Anab is upfront about the fact that her work is provocative. It might not be a great idea to let the world\u2019s bee population go hang and rely instead on synthetic pollinators. \u201cBut the technology that could allow this is waiting to happen. If we don\u2019t create these experience prototypes and stories, it\u2019s difficult for us to fully interrogate the technology before it\u2019s out in the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t think it\u2019s any accident that, as we try to imagine our digital future, we reach, not just for stories, not just for opinions, but also for props, for things we can handle; for toys, basically. \u201cFuturism\u201d is a very serious-sounding idea; yet 99 per cent of the job is \u2013 has to be<\/em> \u2013 play.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Listen on Monday morning to Radio 4: you\u2019ll find the wild and wonderful writer Nick Harkaway, design guru Anab Jain, business expert Charles Arthur and myself discussing the digital future with Andrew Marr. Arc, New Scientist’s new digital quarterly of … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[124,126,370,148,189,234,253,277,279,281],"class_list":["post-1220","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-events","tag-anab-jain","tag-andrew-marr","tag-arc","tag-charles-arthur","tag-harkaway","tag-nick-harkaway","tag-radio-4","tag-start-the-week","tag-superflux","tag-susan-greenfield"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1220","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1220"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1220\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1220"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1220"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1220"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}