Background

We are in a period of intense speculation about the implications of digital technologies for future societies. Steering a path through these speculations is a challenge. The interplays between digital technologies and social life are multiple, complex and iterative over time. While some specific changes may be predictable, ‘the sociodigital future’ is not. Nonetheless, claims to knowledge of sociodigital futures matter. Powerful institutional actors claim knowledge about sociodigital futures that drive huge investments, national policy frameworks and popular imaginations. These open up some sociodigital futures, while closing down others. In this way, knowledge of sociodigital futures becomes an actor in the very futures it appears to describe.

Our approach

In this project, we examine claims to knowledge of sociodigital futures made by governments, industry and management consultancies in a range of reports and policy documents. We include documents that focus on the sociodigital futures of AI, high performance networks, immersive technologies and robotics. Documents are important because they define the matters of concern, and of disregard, when claiming sociodigital futures and – in turn – when acting on those claims. In our project, interdisciplinary teams with technical and social research expertise are analysing what claims are made, by whom and how.

We focus on:

1. the ontology of sociodigital futures: that is, how the digital, the social, the future and the relations between them are understood in these documents, or what sociodigital futures ‘are’; 
2. and the epistemology of sociodigital futures: that is, the data, expertise and techniques that are used to claim knowledge of sociodigital futures.

Opportunities and outcomes

This research provides detailed evidence and analysis of the knowledge practices currently used by powerful institutional actors to claim and make sociodigital futures. Our analysis identifies key weaknesses in these approaches.  This provides the foundations to work with our partners in government, business and community organizations to develop alternative knowledge practices, underpinned by robust theoretical and methodological approaches to sociodigital futures in-the-making.

CenSoF investigators: Kirsten Cater, Susan Halford, Sabine Hauert, Rasheed Hussain, Weiru Liu, Dan McQuillan.