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The Logic of Digital Utopianism

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Abstract

With the Internet’s integration into mainstream society, online technologies have become a significant economic factor and a central aspect of everyday life. Thus, it is not surprising that news providers and social scientists regularly offer media-induced visions of a nearby future and that these horizons of expectation are continually expanding. This is true not only for the Web as a traditional media technology but also for 3D printing, which has freed modern media utopianism from its stigma of immateriality. Our article explores the fundamental semantic structures and simplification patterns of popular media utopias and unfolds the thesis that their resounding success is based on their instantaneous connectivity and compatibility to societal discourses in a broad variety of cultural, political, or economic contexts. Further, it addresses the social functions of utopian concepts in the digital realm.

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Notes

  1. This article partly resumes, expands, and elaborates our lines of arguments on digital media utopianism initially introduced in [1]. We wish to thank the reviewers for their very helpful comments and suggestions, which led to significant improvements in the final outcome.

  2. From a historical perspective, the situation that basic communication infrastructures are operated and driven by private sector providers is not an exclusive phenomenon of our time. The invention of the metal movable-type printing press, for instance, was driven by Johannes Gutenberg and his investor due to tangible economic interests; and from the mid-fifteenth century on, it was able to spread rapidly primarily in light of its high sales potential along the European trade routes [35]. However, the novelty of digital modernity is the hegemony of a very few multinational companies as the operators of the key infrastructures of communication and information retrieval on a global scale that can hardly be counteracted by means of national government regulations. Indeed, such a level of power concentration was never reached in previous phases of media consolidation [36].

  3. Our concept of media utopias as forms of utopian communication is related to other concepts in technology assessment and science and technology studies, first and foremost Armin Grunwald’s concept of visionary “techno-futures.” These futures are “decades away, and exhibit revolutionary features in terms of technology and of culture, human behavior, and individual and social issues” ([53], p. 285). At least all far-ranging techno-utopias are visionary techno-futures. It is, however, an empirical question, if all techno-futures share the narrative patterns that we reconstructed in our research. This can also be said regarding the concept of “socio-technical imaginaries” [54], which is primarily used to make sense of national innovation politics.

  4. This definition is in alignment with the semantic origin of the utopian concept—the “Utopia” of the humanist Thomas More [57]: His book (first published in 1516) combines a radical critique of the current social order with the construction of a radical alternative of social interaction.

  5. Dedicated visioneers are often directly based in the San Francisco Bay area or other centers of technological innovation: “Visioneering means developing a broad and comprehensive vision for how the future might be radically changed by technology, doing research and engineering to advance this vision, and promoting one’s ideas to the public and policy makers in the hopes of generating attention and perhaps even realization.” [63 p. 13.] In this context, Martin Sand stresses the importance “to study the intentions of visioneers, their alternatives, and the effects of their actions thoroughly to find out whether they are responsible.” [64, p. 84]

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Friedrich Schiedel Endowed Chair of Sociology of Science, Technical University of Munich, Marsstr. 20–22, 80335, Munich, Germany

    Sascha Dickel

  2. Institute for Social Sciences, Department of Organizational Sociology and Innovation Studies, University of Stuttgart, Seidenstr. 36, 70174, Stuttgart, Germany

    Jan-Felix Schrape

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Dickel, S., Schrape, JF. The Logic of Digital Utopianism. Nanoethics 11, 47–58 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11569-017-0285-6

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