Mediafutures

Mediafutures Maria Korolkova

Media has always had an ability to shape the future. Marshal McLuhan ([1964] 2001) famously predicted that we all would live in a global village back in 1960s, Lev Manovich called new media “theory of the present” (2001: 6) meaning that this present will inform the century ahead, and even media archaeologies dig deep in the underlayers of media technologies of the past in order to better understand what await us ahead (Zielinski 2006; Sobchak 2022). What can then speculations on mediafutures tell us about today, about the challenges we are all facing in 2022—and the ways to deal with them?

Simple Future: Web 3.0

Metaverse, blockchains, NFTs, decentralised technology and token-based economics. —Web 3.0 promises to be a paradise of freedom, acceptance, diversity and shared knowledge. Yet, only at the first glance. As Ben Tarnoff argues in the forthcoming The Fight for our Digital Future (2022), the modern internet is broken because it is owned privately and run for the purposes of profit maximisation within the flameworks of global capitalism. Johnny Golding, Martin Reinhart and Mattia Paganelli (2021) echo Tarnoff in their take on modern approaches to data and new system of knowledge. They too, like us, believed in “a fruitful explosion of knowledge from the world wide web”, in knowledge that after decades of Cold War “would be available to all at any time in the future, unrestricted and free of charge” (Golding, Reinhart and Paganelli 2021: 8). Yet, at best, event with the modern technologies, there seems to be “an endless undermining of established knowledge-structure-production sites, including universities, art schools, science labs” (ibid.), which often fail to defend themselves. The solutions to this is still in the future—and seems simple enough: to deprivatise the internet, to democratise professionalism, to diversify the knowledge production systems. Otherwise, a small number of executives and investors will continue to make choices on everyone’s behalf, and these choices will remain tightly bound by the demands of the market. It’s time to demand an internet by, and for, the people now, and that is a simple future of Web 3.0.

Future Continuous: Medianatures

Media is hardly just about capitalism and its technologies—furthermore, “media is hardly just about media” (Parikka 2019: 251). The continuous future of understanding media in 2022 cannot be separated from the systems of nature, and the way "nature is embedded in the cultural understanding of life" (ibid.). A longstanding binary opposition of culture and nature is thus united through media and mediated through continuous exchange. Any talk of the environment today immediately transferers in a network of social, political, ethical and aesthetical dimensions (Parkikka 2019; Guattari 2000; Braidotti 2006). This paradigm has its roots in Donna Haraway’s notion of Naturecultures, which

challenges the separation of nature and culture on many different levels, including animal-human relationships of co-becoming, of mediating "livable politics and ontologies in current life worlds” (Harraway 2003: 4). This notion of continuous ‘becoming’ is key here, and it unites our new understanding of both nature and media as two systems of existence. In this paradigm, media technologies are not just communication systems, but materials, which are composed of a variety of elements and forces, and hence become part of a “massive global networks of energy and supply chains that themselves are linked to the geographies of media materials” (Parikka 2019: 252-253), which could be from African, Chinese or Russian origins, and other diverse loci of global ecological operations.

Future Perfect: Miscommunications

Once media are conceptualised as material, they become prone to natural processes of decay, erosion and corruption. The two past decades increasingly see media in its fluid, unstable nature and, more importantly, as a spontaneous force of mistakes, accidents, and miscommunications (see Korolkova and Barker 2021). For media, and technologies, are already and always programmed with accidents—accidents will always have happened by the time the new forms of media are introduced. As Paul Virilio (2007) points out in The Original Accident, the invention of new technology is always already designed with the possibility of failure. Just as the locomotive is pre-designed with the derailment, and the car with the failing breaks, any kind of communications method has a potential for mistake—verbal, digital, or visual. Importantly, this potential of miscommunication suggests new systems and alternative ways to operate beyond dominant structures of communication, which embraces the possibilities of going astray.

Post-future: Post-media

Talking about the future of cultural categories, it is always tempting to add a post- prefix to it. Yet, to talk about the future of media would be as paradoxical as to talk about the future of the future. Media do determine the future in the same way as media are in and of future—any message that needs to be transmitted takes time—and this time is in the future. While we can easily imagine ourselves in the post-digital, i.e. a future where we will be more concerned with being human, than with being digital, a category of post-media is yet to be invented—whether as a form of Web 3.0, a part of nature or a mistake.

References

Braidotti, R. (2006) Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics.

Cambridge: Polity Press. Golding, J., M. Reinhart and M. Paganelli (eds) (2021) Data

Loam: Sometimes Hard, Usually Soft: the Future of

Knowledge Systems. Berlin: De Gruyter. Guattari, F, ([1989] 2000/2008), The Three Ecologies.

London and New Brunswick: The Athlone Press; London:

Continuum. Haraway, D. (2003), The Companion Species Manifesto:

Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness, Chicago: Prickly

Paradigm Press.

Manovich, L. (2001) The Language of New Media

Cambridge: MIT Press. McLuhan, M. ([1964] 2001) Understanding Media: The

Extensions of Man. London: Routledge. Korolkova, M. and T. Barker (2021) Miscommunications:

Errors, Mistakes, Media. New York: Bloomsbury. Parikka, J. (2018) ‘Medianatures’, in R. Braidotti and M.

Hlavajova (eds) Posthuman Glossary. London and New

York: Bloomsbury, pp. 251-253. Zielinski, S. (2006). Deep Time of the Media: Toward an

Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means.

Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Sobchak, V. (2011). 'Afterword: Media Archaeology and

Re-presencing the Past', in E. Huhtamo and J. Parikka (eds) Media Archaeology. Berkeley: University of

California Press, pp. 323–334. Tarnoff, B. (2022) The Fight for our Digital Future. New

York: Verso. Virilio, P. (2007) The Original Accident. Cambridge:

Polity Press.