第７回ときめき☆セミナー（※終了しました）

"Making futures through technology"

発表者：キャスパー・ブルーン・イェンセン(Casper Bruun Jensen)

日時：２０１０年１２月１７日（金）　１４：４０−１６：１０

場所：人間科学研究科・東館３０３

使用言語：英語

【発表要旨】

What is the relation between technologies and the futures of social relations? Futurologists and technologists often portray innovative technologies as a force that drives social change. Social anthropologists and researchers in the tradition of science and technology studies have typically rejected this view as technologically determinist. In rejection of technological determinism they have pointed attention to how technology only comes to function as part of a varied set of relations between people, organizations and cultural imaginaries. But what is the relation between such constellations of people and things and the making of futures? 

This talk takes as its starting point these analytical difficulties. Considering a case of technology building, which was also simultaneously a way of creating new futures for Danish health care, I argue that emergent futures reside neither in discourse, culture or imagination, nor in technological objects by themselves. Instead, futures emerge from the middle of networks that comprise both specific technological capacities and the capacities people have for projecting and scaling those technologies forward in time. Through comparison with prevalent notions in the STS literature, such as boundary objects and obligatory passage points, I show that electronic patient records were not always future-making technologies but became so in a particular moment in time. Technological and discursive transformations aligned in a way that made electronic patient records into a future-generating device. If the future is thus a historically emergent and transformative phenomena, future-generating devices account for some important ways in which current futures are propelled forwards.