Opening keynote: Unknown unknowns: assessing media futures

If we are to facilitate innovation in the media, we need a clear understanding of the forces and dynamics that shape it and the relationship of media, technology and society in general. Today we also need to interrogate the widely held view that technology drives business and society, and that progress is linear and inevitable. We might even question the revolutionary hype around the media itself.

“[Predictors] see technology as conditioning society… it is actually the other way round” Dr Brian Winston

Presenter

Dr Brian Winston, Lincoln Professor of Communications, University of Lincoln

Chair

Peter Day, presenter In Business (BBC Radio 4) and Global Business (BBC World Service)

Overview

Dr Brian Winston When Kazahkstan’s get the ’Net a window on their world will be opened up, says Wikipedia’s founder. Not so – because he’s forgotten the Stalinist dictator who rules the place. This is a perfect example of a ‘forgotten known’. We assess technology in technological terms, naturally enough, but we forget that it is society not technology that drives. That’s why “we tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run”, as Amara’s law states. Remembering social context is the clue to understanding technology’s ‘unknown unknowns’. [Revised 17/06]

Reports and Commentary

Reflections by Charlie Beckett on the POLIS Director’s Weblog

Summary by Mirona Iliescu on cheezy cheeky Weblog

Preparation

Media, Technology and Society: A History: From the Telegraph to the Internet Brian Winston (Routledge, 1998) [Amazon.co.uk]

Bookmark for Reviews: The digital spectrum, Andrew Keen, Prospect, May 2008, issue 146. Review of Against the Machine by Lee Siegel, We-Think by Charles Leadbeater, and Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky.