Writing the Future

Paradigm Shift:  The Emergent Future

length:  5 pages

due dates:  11.12 (proposal), 11.16 (draft), 11.26 (final)

Over the course of this semester, we’ve done a lot to demystify the future, progressively thinking of it less and less as some distant abstraction entirely out of our collective reach, more and more as something emerging within and out of present-day contexts.  Raymond Williams’ language of dominant, residual, and emergent phenomena speaks to this:  just as the residues of the past live on in the present, woven into the fabric of the “now” that seems to have replaced that past, so does the present inevitably contain the seeds of the future that will ostensibly displace it somewhere down the line.

Your task here is to capture this moment of the emergence of a new future—the moment where bubbles are rising but the water is not yet at a boil, its transition to vapor inevitable but not yet in full swing.  Following Thomas Kuhn‘s conception of paradigm shifts, the goal of this paper is to be able to identify some new event or development that registers as an anomaly (something out of the ordinary, perhaps something that has never happened before) and analyze it in relation to both the dominant paradigm from which it deviates and the new, emergent paradigm it inaugurates.  If 9/11 is the 21st century’s archetypal paradigm shift moment, for instance, we’d identify the attacks themselves as an anomaly that our old paradigms (American exceptionalism, invulnerability, insulation from geopolitical struggle) couldn’t have predicted or accounted for, and then we’d articulate the new paradigms that anomaly brought on (“they hate us for our freedom,” we’re under attack, we’re a superpower fighting for its life, we have to fight terror abroad to secure freedom at home, etc. etc.).

To do this, you need to be able to think about past, present, and future.  The history of your subject is important to situating this new development within a larger context (the way that, for Postman, the shift from oral culture to written culture is also relevant to the shift from written culture to televisual culture).  The moment you’re really keying in on analytically and diagnostically is the present day, when something is happening that is going to reshape some crucial elements of human culture and of the way we live—an anomaly that will force a paradigm shift.  (Think back to our unthinkable futures, and how much you can tell about 1993 by what its residents thought would be inconceivable in 2003 or 2013.)  The future is why this moment of anomaly is relevant; the anomaly is worthy of notice precisely because it is going to induce a paradigm shift, a significantly different way of living and thinking and interacting from what we’ve known in the past and what we know currently.

Remember, too, that the effects and changes and ramifications you’re tracing here are likely more subtle than the effects you unpacked in your investigative reports.  To reiterate what I’ve said in class, you want to be thinking here not just about the way this new development is changing its immediate context, but also about its more indirect effects on culture, psychology, behavior, interaction, discourse, and so on.  The Postman book doesn’t just trace the effects of television on marketing or on politics or on education, though those effects are all important and interesting—it traces the effects of television on the way we think, the way we interact, the way we speak, the expectations we have.  You want to be thinking not just about immediate effects but about distant effects, not just direct effects but also indirect effects.  Being a good thinker of the future, remember, has a lot to do with thinking your way out of the short term and into the long term, and with accounting not just for the immediately visible effects of something but also its more distant consequences.

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In summary, your goals:

• *introduce your subject and provide a sense of historical context
• *narrate the anomalous event or development you’ve identified and explain why it’s not just new but different enough to break our old paradigms
• *explain what dominant paradigms in the present might be broken and made obsolete by this anomaly
• *describe the new, emergent paradigms you think will result from the anomaly
• *convincingly predict the consequences of this paradigm shift, both within the specific context of your subject and in the broader sense of human culture and behavior