The dehumanities in cyberutopia: exploring the social and cultural implications of information technology

Abstract

Information Age Theory, Cyberutopian Literature, and Science Fiction, as discursive genres which take information technology as their object of study, enable and legitimise certain forms of knowledge of information technology and its social and cultural implications. Information Age Theory is a mode of research which addresses its object of study within context-bound technicalities and as products of and contributions to its social and cultural contingencies. Cyberutopian Literature is a continuation of the discourse of Futurology, and while claiming to explore possible alternative futures based on revolutionary developments in new communications technologies, engages in a process of creating actual futures based upon the economic and political status quo which are their own discursive conditions of existence. Despite claims to scientific rationality, Cyberutopian Literature makes considerable use of fictional motifs and strategies. Science Fiction, where it employs the contextual mode of analysis, whereby technology is investigated in terms of its own patterns of discursivity and how those patterns of discursivity interrelate with other discourses which make up the social field, provides the framework for a powerful examination of the implications of information technology. The Cyberutopian mode of analysis is an inappropriate means of understanding either the complex relations between technology and contemporary society or the implications of new technologies for the future. Information Age theory and fictional modes of analysis, because of their non-totalising approach, are better able to effectively examine both contemporary situations and possible futures without subsuming complex local, cultural, and social contingencies into a reductionist concept of the global.