The limits of the imaginary
Challenges to intervening in future speculations of memory, data, and algorithms
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12656293 |
|---|---|
| Authors | A N Markham (0000-0001-8152-2473, Aarhus University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2020 |
| Volume | 23 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 382-405 |
| Publication date | 2020-07-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | New Media & Society (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1461-4448 • E-ISSN: 1461-7315 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1177/1461444820929322 |
| OpenAlex | W3039462715 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 103 |
| References cited | 37 |
Over 3 years, researchers, artists, and activists collaborated on eight public engagement experiments in five countries. All focused on building critical consciousness about digital futures. The interventions worked: Once participants broke through the seamlessness of interface surfaces, they immediately thought more critically about how digital platforms actually operate. Yet even as participants reached into these black boxes, they did not imagine alternatives. This article offers a critical theory reading of the theme of inevitability, using the concept of discursive closure, whereby we can see how particular values and (infra)structures are naturalized, neutralized, and legitimated, closing off discussion of alternatives that might counter current hegemonic power. This article highlights the importance of considering iterative formats for speculative interventions, whereby facilitators can focus not only on imagining new or different digital futures, but find creative ways to identify and help overcome the current resignation to the inevitable
Closure (psychology · Consciousness · Economics · Epistemology · Futures contract · Hegemony · Media studies · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Psychoanalysis · Psychological intervention · Reading (process · Sociology · The Imaginary · Computer Science · Ethics and Social Impacts of AI · Information Systems Theories and Implementation · Innovative Human-Technology Interaction · Law · Psychology
Constructing AI power
Imagining and Enacting Futures
Preempting experiential city futures
Algorithmic imaginaries
Community-led approaches to making fairer digital futures
Approaching digital futures
The value affordances of social media engagement features
Enacting machine agency when AI makes one’s day
From Monopolizing Memory to Co-Creating It
Critical Pedagogy as a Practice of Resistance to Algorithms
Imagining Alternative Mediated Futures? Reflections on Experimental Workshops With Young People
Collaborating at Microscopic and Massive Scales
Space, Place and Location in Sexual Social Media
Unpacking the Hidden Curricula in Educational Automation
Static Future Technologies, Dynamic Professionalism — Co-creating Future Scenarios in Medical Imaging Practices
Automation Is Coming! Exploring Future(s)-Oriented Methods in Education
Postdigital Dissensus
Design fiction as critical pedagogy for exploring technology futures in social research
From Mechanical Reproduction to Generative AI
Profaning platforms
The (im)possibility of AI literacy
Using more-than-human approaches to study the politics of AI in the automating of decision making in education
Digital remix as a pedagogical platform intervention
Relational dynamics at the intersection of technology and higher education
‘Help!? My students created an evil AI’
Stories from the future of lifelong learning
Pedagogic encounters with algorithmic system controversies
Near Future Teaching
What ifs
Returning to critical pedagogy in a world of datafication
Data reflexivity as work-in-progress
Repairing what’s not broken – Algorithm repair manual as reflexivity device
Exploring affective Polarisation of the (Digital) Public Sphere in Slovenia
How do Canadian faculty members imagine future teaching and learning modalities
The power of the norm
Radical imagination for a new social contract for education
Epic disappointment
Imaginaries of platform entrepreneurship in the creative industries
Contextual social valences for artificial intelligence
Individual choice, collective effects
Automation hesitancy
Towards Algorithmic Luddism
Hall’s encoding/decoding model revisited in the digital platform age
Digital Platforms and Algorithmic Subjectivities
Futures at the Threshold
WhatsApp
Imagination as contested terrain
Can AI Dream? The Role of Ethnographic Imagination in Researching Health Care Work Futures With Generative AI
Infrastructural politics amidst the coils of control
Predicting Covid-19
Intersectional Inquiry, on the Ground and in the Algorithm
Co-Presence and Contingency
Logged in While Locked Down
Enacting and re-politicising co-design
Machine visions
Mapping the transnational imaginary of social media genres
Technologies of last resort
An algorithmic event
Nothing is inevitable
The “algorithmic as if
The silicon future
Algorithms as conversational partners
Algorithms and hegemony in the workplace
Struggling With the Black Box
Rural education imaginaries in digital education policy
It’s not about the tech but the mindset”
Resigned reductionism
Interdisciplinary futures? A conceptual approach
Governing gene-edited crops
Divergent Futures in a Damaged Territory
Media Framing of Dominant Ideologies in Explanatory Journalism Concerning Artificial Intelligence and Robotics
AI and data-driven urbanism
The taming of sociodigital anticipations
Building plausible scenarios for future living
Critical, Qualitative and Situated
I don’t know if I can share this.”
Utopian and Dystopian Sociotechnical Imaginaries of Big Data
Within the hour" and "wherever you are
Digitalization, Digitization and Datafication
Unstoppable Implementation. Technological Imaginaries on Artificial Intelligence in Southern European Journalism
Digital activism in the future past
Is Artificial Intelligence in Education an Object or a Subject? Evidence from a Story Completion Exercise on Learner-AI Interactions
Data Ableism
Artificial Intelligence and the Futures Turn
Surveillance Imaginaries
Future Movement Future – Rejected
Opening alternative data imaginaries in urban studies
Memories of Future Empire
It's Like They Are Using Our Data Against Us.” Counter‐Cartographies of AI Literacy
Prefigurative imaginaries
Unavoidable futures? How governments articulate sociotechnical imaginaries of AI and healthcare services
Design anthropological foresighting
AI Literacy in Teacher Education
European Search? How to counter-imagine and counteract hegemonic search with European search engine projects
Civil society organizations in intelligence accountability
Visual Design Anthropology
What Future for the Sociology of Futures? Visions, Concepts and Methods
Creative Co-Imagination in Transgenerational Comics Workshops
Generative AI and Broken Futures
Datafied ageing futures
Democracy in an age of corporate colonization
Addiction by Design
Uncertain Futures
Algorithms of Oppression
The Affordances of Social Media Platforms
The Computer for the 21st Century
Technological frames
Bringing Technological Frames to Work
On systematically distorted communication
Programmed Visions
Modern Social Imaginaries
Gender Trouble
You never really know who’s looking”
The Social Construction of Facts and Artefacts
Disciplining the Future
Shaping the Web
Notes on the Underground
Performing as a moral act
Aramis
The politics of 'platforms
On Technological Determinism
The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies
Prophecy and the near future
Imagined Affordance
Acting Up
Taking Data Literacy to the Streets
| Unique citing works | 103 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 20,6 |
| Citation span | 2021 - 2026 (6) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | Yes |
| Citation types | Neutral: 98 |