The future. Instructions for use
How to research tomorrow for today - Media Ecology Newsletter #35
In the unlikely event that you have wondered why this newsletter has gone through such a long period of silence, it is because in the meantime I have been finishing to write a book. It is called, in Italian, "Apologia del futuro. Quello che il domani può fare per noi” (Luiss University Press, 2024). Maybe it could be literally translated as: "Apology for the Future. What tomorrow can do for us”.
Futures imagination
Predicting the future is an act power. Imagining possible futures is an act of liberation.
Forgetting the future is an unconditional surrender. Considering the consequences of our daily actions is a vital necessity. For every individual and every community, writing their own future, instead of leaving this task to others, is a crucial civic choice.
Those are the book’s main concepts.
Since the futures can be possible, plausible, and preferable, the program of the book is to build a research strategy based on three pillars:
1. The present in perspective. To look for possible futures, we read the current facts that shape human experience in order to learn how to see their consequences, delving into the dynamics that open up different possible futures.
2. Critique of future investigations. To look for what’s plausible, we develop an analytical toolkit in a structurally interdisciplinary key, denouncing manipulations and seeking authenticity, to defeat single thinking and liberate alternatives, with a clear historical approach.
3. Futures as a project. To understand which are the preferable futures, design becomes an integral part of the research, with its ability to take into account the trends that drive society ahead, with its instinct to see what needs to change and what needs to stay the same, with its ability to intervene through innovation, in the process by which humans adapt to their context or transform it.
Reading
In the meantime, I’m reading quite a lot. What are the best new books, in my opinion, about the transformation we are living through? Four are quite outstanding, although quite different:
Ruha Benjamin, Imagination. A Manifesto, Norton 2024
Geoff Mulgan, When Science Meets Power, Polity 2024
Ethan Mollick, Co-Intelligence. Living and Working with AI, Allen 2024
Urs Gasser & Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Guardrails. Guiding Human Decisions in the Age of AI, Princeton University Press 2024
Of course, if you lost it, another book was worth reading last year:
Mustafa Suleyman, The Coming Wave, Crown 2023
All these authors navigate the transformation with ideas that enlighten the path, without describing it harder than it probably is only to convince the reader to go ahead with the book. But all these authors help us see that much of what we think is related to what’s in our mind more than what we are able to define reality. «And so we need a deeper synthesis of science and politics» writes Mulgan «that can help us think, wisely, about the multiple dilemmas of science and technology that are with us already and are only set to intensify, from quantum and genomes to pathogens. The aim must be do improve the metacognition of our societies, our collective ability to think and act in complex environments».
Protecting our minds
Reading books is a habit that is part of mind care, a kind of cognitive hygiene, while social media are problematic.
Meta, owner of Facebook and Instagram, is accused by the European Commission of not doing enough to protect teens and curb cases of social networking addiction. (BBC)
France blocks TikTok in New Caledonia to curb the protest in the overseas territory. (Politico)
Scientists say disinformation is spreading before the US elections. (NBC). And it seems already working in India (AP).
We have a survey here: What is the latest "fake news" you read on social media?
For Italian posts, please read my blog. At present, on that blog, I’m collecting “enlightening” ideas.
The Nòva blog is now hosting an article by Antonio Navarra that explains how artificial intelligence has created a new way to study the weather.
Please take a look at Reimagine Europa. A Media Ecology Research Network is being build in Bruxelles and it grows every day. I will be informing on that more in the next issues. Reimagine Europa.
In previous Media Ecology:
November 23rd - Much AI do about nothing
May 30th - The aliens are coming
May 11th - I’m a prompt man
April 21th – The truth about fake
April 7th – CheatGPT
March 31th – Artificial intelligencija
March 16th – The method is the message
February 9th – Epistemology of AI
Podcasts in Italian, by me
Automaticamente. Rai Radio 3
Lezioni di futuro. Il Sole 24 Ore
L’altra metà del verso. Rai Radio 3
Media Ecology. Intesa Sanpaolo on air
Eppur s’innova. Luiss University Press
Ecology of screens
On the occasion of the International Conference Vivre par(mi) les écrans: entre passé et avenir, which was held in Lyon at the end of May, the newsletter of the International Research Group Vivre par(mi) les écrans and the Media Ecology newsletter agreed to signal, each to its recipients, the importance to them of the other's content, inviting them to subscribe to receive it and disseminate it among their contacts. So please visit Vivre par(mi) les écrans and subscribe to the newsletter. This choice of collaboration stems from the common project of promoting, developing and sharing highly qualified knowledge aimed at creating tools for guidance, critique and intervention in the field of media ecology and our current and future living between(mite) screens, as well as fostering the social dissemination of the aforementioned knowledge and tools.