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In paleontology and archeology the location of fossils or artifacts in different layers provides historical and timeline clues. Looking carefully, layers can also be found in the infrastructure, specially in the case of urban landscape.
In this image (taken in the Brick Lane area of East London) different layers are visible: the elevated train bridge structure dates from the industrial revolution era, the street sign in English and Bengali denotes the immigration flux in the second half of the twentieth century, the one-way signal indicates the necessity of traffic regulation related to street congestion, and the graffiti and stencils the current process of trendification (the phase prior to gentrification?) of the area.
The chronological relation between these layers may not be as straightforward as in the case of geology or archeology, where, basically, deeper means older; but there are also time cues, such as the rust in the Bengali street sign that can be read to understand how the different layers relate and overlap in the historic evolution of the city.
I read yesterday, in the Spanish paper El País, an interview with Manuel Castells. The motivation for the interview is the publication of the Spanish translation of his latest book: Mobile Communication and Society.
As usual, Castells' comments are thought provoking. I have specially found interesting his position against what could be called technological futurology, that he summarizes in this phrase (translatedd from the Spanish original text): "In reality, what most people calls future is the present, what happens is that they do not know it".
He shows his point describing how mobile technologies are changing the way the world gets access to communication and services. There has been a lot of talk in the past years about the digital divide and how most part of the world population does not have access to computers and, consequently, data networks and services. There have been lots of initiatives to reduce the digital divide, usually focused on providing some kind of access to computers to the 'disconnected' populations (internet kiosks, internet community centers, OLPC...), but what is really giving the possibility to access on-line services to many groups that would, otherwise, remain disconnected are mobile technologies: more than half of the world's population today has access to a mobile phone.
This concept of future is, precisely, what I want to refer to in the title of the blog. It is not about forecasting what is going to happen, and what the world is going to look like ten years from now. Lots of people have tried to do that with very little success. The possibilities of getting it wrong are much, much higher than guessing what is going to happen, so lets leave predictions to astrologers, chiromantics....
For me, taking about future is talking about what is happening today that is changing the way we do things, communicate, work, live.... Future is the path, not the destination, and when you want to follow a path that you do not know, you need to focus on the curves and slopes, the little changes, rather than trying to figure out what the destination is going to look like.
I have stayed for a few days in London, and one of the things that has surprised me is the large number of closed-circuit TV (CCTV) surveillance signs that you can see in public places such as stores, the underground an even in the streets.
We have an image of the UK as one of the societies with a high level of concern on the protection of privacy. It is one of the few countries in Europe where there are no identity cards of any form issued by the government, and when, once in a while, an identity card initiative is proposed, it faces so much opposition that it gets dropped by politicians. The proliferation signs warning of CCTVs in operation is, at least superficially, opposite to this image.
Maybe the perception of the abundance of CCTVs was caused by the legal requirement to warn citizens of their existence, making CCTV signs quite ubiquitous in the London city landscape, but it certainly produced some estrange situations, like this CCTV sign besides a big graffiti (or street art?). Usually, the painting of street art such as this is somewhere in the fringes of legality, so the image makes you wonder what was first: the CCTV or the graffiti, and how those symbols of different lifestyles and attitudes ended up side by side in the street.
Beyond the curious image there is a whole reflection on how surveillance technology can change our habits and attitudes about the public space. Up to which extent do you change your behaviour when you know that CCTV is operating in a certain public space?, is the proliferation of surveillance warning signs going to trivialize it or, on the contrary, is it going to act to create social reaction to the technology?. And, of course, what happens when there is the possibility that some kind of surveillance is being done without any information signs?...
Panopticon or 1984, the fact is that surveillance based distopias are, today, part of our collective imaginary, so this is going to be an area of friction between technology capabilities and social expectations and concerns...
A couple of weeks ago, I caught TV program on deslocalization. I guess that the term sounds quite strange in English , but in French, and also in Spanish, it has become quite a common word to refer to the process of migration of (more or less skilled) jobs from developed to developing countries.
Obviously, since the term has been coined in countries that, supposedly, are loosing jobs in this process (and where labor unions are quite powerful), it has a very negative connotation. Even the word itself shows this connotation: deslocalization seems to suggest that work is being moved out of a location, a place, to somewhere in hyperspace, rather than what is really happening: being moved from one location to another. Relocalization sounds like a more exact term to describe the concept, but this term would probably not have the same impact...
Going back to the program, I got interested because they were showing some images of Bangalore, including some places, streets and shopping malls, that I had visited several times while we were living there, but the fact is that, in terms of contents, it was not very good. It abounded in the image of jobs being steeled from the developed countries, while, at the same time, the traditional values of the destination countries is also lost. It focused, mostly, on call centers, so there were also the typical topics of English accent training classes and the hard job of spending 8 hours a day answering customer calls.
In particular, there was this portion where they showed how some call center employees went to the mall to do some shopping of western items after receiving their monthly salary. The funny (or maybe sad) part is that they made that sound as something wrong: why should people from a third world country spend their hard earned money in western items such as cell phones or jeans?.
The fact is that there were lots of underlying cliches on which are the expectations, needs and values of social groups in developing countries, and, using a very superficial analysis, the conclusion was that deslocalization was bad both for the source and the destination countries. I guess that the intention was to justify the opposition to the whole phenomenon not only on the basis of job losses but also on the supposedly perverse effect on the culture and way of living in the destination countries.
The effects of deslocalization, offshoring, job migration, or however you want to call it... are much more complex, deep (and unsettling?) that what a TV program can show in little less than one hour, and you cannot expect that a deep social analysis on those effects will keep general public's attention, but simplification should not mean just jumping into cliched conclusions...
When the program was shown I was also reading India's New Middle Class by Leela Fernandes, and, although offshoring is not the main topic of the book, it describes and explains the causes for lots of the consuming habits changes in the new middle class in India, and their complex relation to the success of India as one of the destinations for high technology enabled jobs. (Unluckily, I forgot the book, when I had read more than three quarters of its content, in an airport loungue...)
You start to feel old when some your generation icons become revival decoration items...Remember when space invders was the latest thing in arcade games?; well, after a few(?) years it is back as trendy street art.
Found by my 6 years old son in a pedestrian street in Covent Garden, London (and the day was my 42nd birthday, so maybe that's why I was feeling old...)
