Thursday, 23 May 2013

The Future


If we were to ask ourselves, what the future would look like in 20 years, it would be almost impossible to imagine how far technology will have advanced. If we look back 20 years ago to 1993, the difference between technology and media use then to now is incomparable. No mp3 players, cd diskman or iTunes. No flat screen/ digital tvs, no wifi, no iPods, iPads or iPhones. No online banking or shopping and no Facebook, Bebo, MySpace or YouTube! The list goes on and on. Yet today, these items and platforms are what form the basis of how we live our lives. It almost seems impossible to think how we could live without them. So in saying this, how far can technology progress in the future?

It is almost as if technology is moving too fast. New devices and forms of technology are produced regularly making it very difficult to keep up to date with the latest goods on the market and the platforms in which they are used. Keller Easterling describes the fact that, “ while accepting that a technology like mobile telephony has become the world’s largest shared platform for information exchange, we are perhaps less accustomed to the idea of space as a technology or medium of information.”

There is no doubt that we are becoming more familiar with the idea of how information and data can travel from person to person via the use of space around us. However it is this feeling of hauntology that makes us skeptical not only about what the future holds, but also the thought of being haunted buy the ghosts of the past. An article by Gallix (2011), it refers to hauntology as “the priority of being and presence with the figure of the ghost as that which is neither present, nor absent, neither dead nor alive”. It originated in France from Jacques Derrida where it appeared first in Spectres of Marx (1993).

With this thought in mind, it is evident that although we are constantly evolving with new technology and media platforms, there is still an element of fear that we possess of the unknown and what the future may hold. With the rapid rate that technology is progressing it is only fair that we have these questions and fears about the future of media and how we will be dealing with them as time progresses.

References

Andrew Gallix (2011) ‘Hauntology: A not-so-new critical manifestation
The new vogue in literary theory is shot through with earlier ideas’


Keller Easterling (2011) ‘An Internet of Things’, e-flux journal, < http://www.e-flux.com/journal/an-internet-of-things/ >

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