Tagged: speculation

WHAT IF EARTH WAS INVADED BY MARTIANS?

Photo: By author

Well, it almost was. Sort of. As good as.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we interrupt our program of dance music to bring you a special bulletin from the Intercontinental Radio News. At twenty minutes before eight, Central Time, Professor Farrell of the Mount Jennings Observatory, Chicago, Illinois, reports observing several explosions of incandescent gas, occurring at regular intervals on the planet Mars. The spectroscope indicates the gas to be hydrogen and moving towards the Earth with enormous velocity…”

It was the day before Halloween, October 30, 1938. The CBS radio network, armed with actor and future filmmaker Orson Welles and his Mercury Theatre group, unleashed a broadcast that announced a huge meteorite had smashed into a New Jersey farm. New York was under attack by Martians.

The radio play, narrated by Orson Welles, was written and performed to sound like a real news broadcast about an invasion from Mars.

It was not, but people were convinced it was the end of the world. At one point in the broadcast, one of the actors playing a journalist in the field, dramatically described the emergence of one of the aliens from a spacecraft:

“Good heavens, something’s wriggling out of the shadow like a grey snake.”

The show aired as a series of simulated news bulletins that suggested a verisimilitude to listeners, who believed that an alien invasion by Martians was currently in progress. Mass hysteria ensued. The program, The Mercury Theatre on the Air was a series of live radio dramas that always ran without ads which historians say, helped the broadcast authentically simulate how radio worked in an emergency.

The ultimate moral panic:

In the days following the adaptation, however, there was widespread outrage and panic by certain listeners, who had believed the events described in the program were real.

It made Orson Welles (more) famous. Listen to the broadcast here.

AN IDEA: DESIGN FICTION

Design fiction has been usefully defined as:

…an approach to design that speculates about new ideas through prototyping and storytelling.

There’s that word again! Speculate. The concept and practice of design fiction lives in the space of conventions where artists and scientists get together. One of design fiction’s original mutations is the science-fiction genre novel. In an interview with sci-fi author Bruce Sterling, the whole concept of suspending belief in order to imagine change (in terms of potential objects and services) is interrogated.

What I can glean, is that design fiction is a literal presentation of The Future of Objects. I can see how artists and scientists alike are engaging. Sterling explains that the main way this is done is through video presentations containing a series of vignettes of people interacting with objects and services, as opposed to straight out science-fiction feature films. The emphasis is on participating in the creation of future gadgets, literally designing for the future, rather than telling futuristic stories with ‘Avatar-style heroics’:

It’s not a kind of ficiton. It’s a kind of design. It tells worlds rather than stories.

Clearly, there’s never been a shortage of science-fiction cinema. I just watched Blade Runner (1982) for the first time last night – I hope that’s not what 2019 will look like. Matthew Ward’s article on design fiction in design education roots these ideas in a more relevant context. His reading is a direct follow on from Adrian’s ideas on speculation, of looking forward. Literally, how has design fiction been left out of educational practice and, how has the activity of speculation been left out of education?

It makes a lot of sense it terms of design:

Whether a week, month, year or decade away, designers produce propositions for a world that is yet to exist.

How does this relate to me? Well, in some ways I guess I am a designer too. Strip that title of its general connotations to graphic, interior, fashion, app, architect, industrial: in my Professional Communications trajectory, I am a designer of words, media, communications strategies and ideas into meaningful wholes. Wow – liberating in the Dziga Vertov kinda way! The term designer in this sense lends itself to connotations in the ruminative fields of re-arranger, bricklayer, or projectionistI like how this course is encouraging me to come to terms with my eventual, yet impending graduation and what happens then. Yes, my thoughts are legitimate contributions but only if I use them in the right way.

I sense I have detected a mindset of Model I behaviour, the very act of discovery lending itself to Model II behaviour.

Photo: By author

A NOTE ON PREDICTIVE TECHNOLOGIES

This week the New York Times reported that Silicon Valley tycoons like Google are working on a new ‘thing’ called predictive search. These tools will ultimately act like a pocket PA from your iPhone, anticipating what you need or where you need to be before you’re even late. Creepy:

How does the phone know? Because an application has read your e-mail, scanned your calendar, tracked your location, parsed traffic patterns and figured out you need an extra half-hour to drive to the meeting.

Engineers explained that it’s such an advanced ‘search’, it doesn’t require people to enter a search querie – the querie is the users individual context (location, time of day and digital activity).

On the creep factor, experts said it might be great for 30-something Silicone Valley geeks, but not so much for 60-something executives. Still:

The technology is emerging now because people are desperate for ways to deal with the inundation of digital information, and because much of it is stored in the cloud where apps can easily access it.

A great example of speculative thinking.

SPECULATION!

The idea of ‘speculation’ in Networked Media has been mentioned many times. It’s a very different way of thinking about education and the weaving workflows of media articles on our blogs. It’s utterly counter-intuitiuve to any prior learning most students, and certainly I, have done. A la Adrian Miles:

Education is not consumerism.

Be a knowledge producer, not content consumer.

Here the focus is on looking forward, instead of reflecting away at what has been and past. Last week in the lecture, Adrain made it clear that we are the engineering students of the 1920’s, that is, we are situated for pioneering radical change because of the subject of our education and the times we are in. We are young, forward thinking, technologically savvy and in debt = let us soothe your inadequacy, old man, and propel your business into the new age of media communications.

This idea of speculation only sunk in for me this week, when a quote by legendry filmmaker Dziga Vertov came to mind. He wrote:

WE affirm the future of cinema art by rejecting its present.

To me, this is such a radical statement. I think this is the space of speculation in media education, and what Adrian Miles had in mind. When Vertov made this declaration, he made a comment not only on the revolutionary potential of the medium of cinema, but of the emancipatory potential of realism in art. Relevantly, the act of engaging in speculative media practices can be liberating, insightful and forward thinking while still remaining grounded in reality. Initially I had trouble understanding the emphasis on speculation, imagining I’d have to free write dystopic science-fiction…