Tony Stevenson

Will our futures look different, now?

Abstract Having reached this outlook at the Year 2000, will an interest in the future wane? Will our futures look different? The confluence of two constructs—century and millennium—is happening amidst new curiosity and imaginings about human thinking. The certainties used to make sense of our world are cracking, just as Western geopolitical and economic power arrogantly strives for global monopoly. This new globalism is legitimised by a mindset that prizes hierarchy, market-place competition, conquest and one-way assimilation. Alternative mindsets, valuing collaboration for example, allow a critique and redefinition of persistent problems of power, as well as the invention of cultures of the future. Can explorations from alternative mindsets—feminist, indigenous, ecological, civilisational and others—help reshape the social order? Should we learn to think across multiple mindsets that are more than variations on the dominant worldview? The new-century agenda for futures studies is to experiment with bypassing the ‘groupthink’ that now sets in when envisioning new futures.

Netweaving alternative futures: Information technocracy or communicative community?

Abstract The metaphor of networking is widely used to describe how the emerging communications and information technologies are supposedly overcoming the tyranny of distance. In this case it has positive overtones, as if the barriers are coming down for a more open exchange among different people separated by distance and culture, making for some kind of better world, but is such technological optimism justified? Also, is it deliberate promotion on the part of eager technocrats whose vested interests have been favoured often ahead of a concern for the human condition? Here, an alternative metaphor, netweaving, is used in order to examine the apparent tensions and paradoxes surrounding the introduction of new communications and information technologies. Especially it will investigate the complex associations between apparently opposing dimensions within three layers of the social fabric: globalisation/localisation; centralisation/decentralisation; and standardisation/diversification. A futures studies assessment is used to anticipate alternative scenarios for the impact on the social fabric by the emerging technologies a generation from now, in 2020.

BRINGING MULTIPLE PERSPECTIVES TO AUSTRALIA'S COMMUNICATION FUTURES: BEYOND THE SUPERHIGHWAY?

A case study is presented of the multi-method and multi-discipline approach to anticipating the social and policy implications of new communication and information technologies (C&IT) being adopted by the Communication Centre at the Queensland University of Technology. This work draws on frameworks which include action research, structurational approaches to technology, coevolutionary systems theory, information economics, feminist and poststructuralist theories, and civilisational and critical approaches to futures studies. The main theoretical perspectives and methodologies we draw on are outlined, together with some of our research findings. Some future scenarios for communication in Australia, beyond the technological optimism of the information superhighway rhetoric, are presented. The often paradoxical relationship between technological change and social change is recognised. We argue that rather than being driven by the entertainment or commercially-oriented applications of the ‘information superhi...