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MODELING OF DIGITAL FUTURES 293

how more or less smoothly current trends are UTOPIAS, DYSTOPIAS, AND BEYOND
expected to continue. Alternative scenarios
might be constructed according to assump- The rising speed with which the New
tions of successful cooperation between Information and Communication Technologies
decisive actors, its conflictual breakdown, or (NICT) are being introduced has inspired
some intermediate path. This has been done, much euphoria among scholars and the larger
for example, in an interdisciplinary study of public. Marshall McLuhan’s famous notion of
the impact of the climate change on the a ‘global village’(McLuhan,1964) gained with
Lower Weser region in Germany, in which the breakthroughs in digital technologies and
indicators of social conflict, economic the rise of the Internet renewed popularity.
competition, and global cooperation were After the disillusionment with radio and televi-
integrated into a regional econometric model sion, which fostered war propaganda and mass
for the generation of path-specific long-term culture industries more than global neighborli-
future scenarios (Schulz, 1999, 2001d). ness, the Internet provided a new canvas for
The study of the futures of the past shows projecting hopes and seemed to offer the ben-
how certain expectations can, depending on efit of a true interactivity that the earlier elec-
context, serve as self-fulfilling prophecies tronic media had lacked. The number of people
or bring about just the opposite of what was going online experienced growth rates so enor-
expected (cf. Bell, 1997a). Warnings about mously high that it appeared to observers as if
the cost of conflict can help to persuade the it would be only a matter of a relatively short
relevant actors to cooperate. Predictions time until everyone could share the bounty
about rising values in the stock market tend of the Internet and become part of a global
to contribute to increases in the stocks’ value. community.
Most recent normative theorizing tends to The utopian hopes for computer-mediated
postulate cooperation as a necessary mecha- global reconciliation evaporated in the
nism for the making of preferable futures course of events associated with September
(Bell, 1997b; Masini, 1999). The major 11, 2001, and were replaced by dystopian
exceptions are free market advocates, for views of an unavoidable ‘clash of civiliza-
whom competition is the only conceivable tions’ (Huntington, 1996). The specter of
engine of innovation, growth, and progress. cyber terrorism was employed to justify new
Yet, no matter how strongly market security measures. Critics warned of the
advocates embrace the notion of competi- NICT’s repressive potential, pointing to a
tion, it can function only on assumptions future of universal surveillance, not only by
of cooperation with regard to market rules an Orwellian ‘big brother’ government, but
and institutional structures enforcing these also by private corporations (Lyon, 2001;
rules. Sassen, 2000). On the other hand, business
However, a more detailed discussion of the hopes for windfall gains from e-commerce
role that the principles of competition, con- shattered, at least temporarily, when the
flict, and cooperation play in all of the ‘dot.com’ bubble imploded and the limits of
diverse strands of futures research would be market expansion became apparent. NICT
beyond the scope of this chapter. I will there- diffusion, which was once regarded almost as
fore focus my discussion in an exemplary an automatism, turned out to be a much more
fashion on a – in my view – particularly complicated matter. I will return to the various
salient aspect of the current future, that is., aspects of these contradictory visions of
the modeling of digital futures. A brief exam- alternative digital futures after a brief exami-
ination of fundamental empirical data will nation of empirical data on the global diffu-
point to the theoretical and normative issues sion of NICT, which will also help to point to
at stake. the theoretical and normative issues at stake.