Digital Futures in the Making
Description
Digital Futures in the Making brings together digital anthropology and anthropology of the future to examine digital future-making and its politics in Europe, contributing to the growing conversation in digital humanities about how technology is lived, contested, and imagined in everyday life. Taking a practice-oriented perspective, the volume explores both current engagements with digital technologies and the possibilities imagined around them. Spanning diverse domains such as cultural heritage, healthcare, and military robotics, the chapters discuss future-making as an open-ended process, foregrounding the role of everyday practices and politics in articulating near futures. The sections of the volume address three interconnected dimensions of digital future-making: imaginaries, which address how envisioned futures are negotiated; materialities, which consider how digital infrastructures are developed, implemented, and appropriated in daily contexts; and politics and ethics, which analyse the moral and legal frameworks that arise alongside the design and use of digital technologies. Digital Futures in the Making speaks to scholars, researchers, and students in anthropology, digital media, digital humanities, as well as those working in sociology and adjacent interdisciplinary domains.
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Persons
Samantha Lutz is a cultural anthropologist affiliated with the Institute for Anthropological Studies in Culture and History, University of Hamburg, Germany.
Anna Oechslen is a cultural anthropologist. She works as a postdoctoral researcher at the Leibniz Institute for Research on Society and Space in Erkner, Germany.
Quoc-Tan Tran is a cultural anthropologist. He works as a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Studies of Science at Bielefeld University, Germany.
Gertraud Koch is Professor of Anthropological Studies in Culture and History at the University of Hamburg, Germany
Content
0. Introduction: Digital futures in the making: Temporalities
Part One: Imaginaries Futures in the making: Sociotechnical imaginaries in technological development
1. Digital future-making in the military: Imaginaries, nostalgia, and disillusionment
2. Politics of the unpolitical: Authoritarian futures in the making?
3. Imagining and infrastructuring desirable futures with humans in the loop. Human Computation and Hybrid Intelligence as counter-imaginaries to artificial general intelligence
4. Sociotechnical imaginaries of the museum: Conversational agents and visitor engagement
5. Transmitting tradition in a 'once-in-a-generation' festival. Digital memory and the future of the Fête des Vignerons
Part Two: Materialities Materialising futures: intra-actions with/of digital infrastructures
6. The material side of digital evolution: On rhythms and relations of innovation making in the woodworking crafts
7. Tablets, tutors, table charts. On digital technologies and future-making in the classroom
8. Making futures material: Screenshotting mental therapy chatbots' transactional exchanges as matters of care
Part Three: Politics and Ethics Negotiating digital futures: Politics of technology and regimes of living
9. A Matter of Pace: Contesting digital futures through boredom and disconnection
10. The role of (research) ethics in applied artificial intelligence applications research
Epilogue
11. The digital future is 'electric blue' - On brainrot and how (not) to get stuck in the aesthetics of the interface