Sam Kinsley

On Friday 26th February I submitted my PhD thesis, entitled “Practising tomorrows? Ubiquitous computing and the politics of anticipation“. I am now working as a Research Fellow in Digital Cultures, as part of the newly founded Digital Cultures Research Centre and the University of the West of England.

Here is the abstract for the thesis:

This thesis describes the ways in which technological futurity is a complex array of performative and proactive dispositions towards the future that are irreducible to normative and deterministic understandings of ‘progress’. It takes ubiquitous computing as a significant case study because the future orientation practised in ubiquitous computing research and development is emblematic of the perpetual technological forecasting in which humanity engages. While ubiquitous computing has existed as an agenda for nearly 20 years it is still largely concerned with a future that has not (yet) been realised. In the context of ubiquitous computing this thesis argues that it is necessary to make the politics of anticipation, as the particular discursive and performative ways in which future-orientation is codified and conditioned, explicit in technology development. This thesis therefore enacts a critical framework that charts a discourse of anticipation, as the multiple means for articulating proactive future orientation, internal to which are anticipatory logics that structure and rationalise how such forms of futurity are practised.

The motivation and ambit of this research is to thereby describe a politics of anticipation as the ways in which the anticipation of technological futures is codified and contested, whilst performative and multiple. Empirically, the argument is made through the discussion of interviews conducted with a range of internationally significant practitioners of ubiquitous computing research and development, which were carried out in Silicon Valley, California, in 2008. Attending to discourse, logics and emergent politics of anticipation provides a means of making explicit how our ‘knowledge’ of technological futures is produced. It is therefore argued that we should attend to socio-technical futurity as inherently situated in the living present, with all of its associated concerns, and allow for the indeterminacy of the future.

I’m not going to flatter myself that many people actually follow this blog but, nevertheless, I thought I ought to briefly post to say I’m knee-deep in writing what has become known as the ‘bloody thesis’ and so can’t come to the web as much as I might like. I hope to get back to posting a little more regularly in 2010, once I’ve handed in the aforementioned loathsome pile of paper sandwiched between two sheets of card.

In the meantime I spout sporadic inanities on twitter, cos it can be done quickly(!), which can be found here: twitter.com/samkinsley.

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Related to the last one but slightly different - ‘practising tomorrows’:

Representing ‘things to come’:

I’m no fan of coining neologisms, but(!) I think I have a need for a word that pithily and succinctly allows me to cast mild derision at certain forms of speculation. It seems to be possible to carve out a career by publicising one’s work by stretching beyond the conventional limits of the remit of a particular project and making grand claims about ‘progress’. This is often identifiable by the monotonous use of phrases such as “in the future you/we will…”. Sometimes this is excusable, people get excitedly exuberant about their research and ideas (sometimes it’s done for you!), but other times it is clearly a deliberate tactic. Thus, I think we can describe what they’re up to as ’spectaculation’. For it is not idle speculation but taking a speculative claim and widening its application, making it sound more important and thus more news-worthy i.e. spectacular. So we arrive at spectaculation, and of course somebody else (probably lots of people actually) has thought of this already (in a slightly different sense): credit where it’s due.

Image credit: Flickr user ‘Unhindered by Talent’.

Towards the end of a recent meeting with my supervisors I was asked a question that went something along the lines of: “do you buy the argument that if something is computational, that it is then necessarily reductive?” An excellent question I think. I suggested at the time, and still believe, there are two answers to this question that go together. First, by virtue of what computing ‘is’, as a machine-enabled set of processes that rely by and large on languages based in a formal logic, we must answer ‘yes’. Second, ‘computing’ as an activity and ‘computers’ as devices do not exist in a vacuum they are a part of our lives. I am writing a blog post using my laptop, connected to a network of other computers, run and maintained by people, allowing me to ‘publish’ my thoughts on a web site held on yet another computer, and hopefully some other people are reading this! Therefore, computing is definitely a part of the ‘politics of things‘, as suggested by Latour, with and by which we and others socialise.

My two answers are not mutually exclusive, “either/or”, they go together such that, I argue, we must increasingly see ‘computing’ as a connective capacity. Computing connects people with other people, people with ideas, information with things, etc etc. In this way, I have some sympathy for those, like Adam Greenfield, that suggest that “ubiquitous computing”, or something like it, was somewhat inevitable. However, I think hindsight definitely smoothes out the errors and stumblings along the way. If we think about ubiquitous computing as “the application of computational tools to human activity regardless of the shape and form of those tools”, following Scott Carter (whom I interviewed this summer), I think we can see computing as an ‘affordance’, the capacity to enable possible actions, which is innately connective. Here we might start looking to Gregory Bateson or Deleuze and Guattari to theorise such a connective capacity.

Why do I blog this? It is useful to keep probing concepts central to, and perhaps assumed, in one’s arguments, and I don’t want to lose sight of the fact that the idea of ‘computing’ is not neccesarily fixed.

Image: Google’s first server, held in the Computer History Museum, CA, taken by me.