THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE OF THE FUTURE: TYRANNY OF MEDIA IN ORGANIZING OUR IMAGERY

The tyranny of the media describes it how futuretypes unsatisfactorily repeat our own fraught relationship with media technologies and communication. Narratives of the future treat media as transparent channels for information rather than active coconstituents of reality. Communication technologies more often than not are embellishments to the mise en scene and evidence of a future achieved rather than elements causal to that future. Framing the future as a zone of action is time management in the future tense. Sci-fi itself as a genre of thought concerned with the future with an emphasis on technology and rationality tends to be a symptom and intensification of a space-biased culture, rather than a corrective. Rather than look to the past, sci-fi looks to the future, yet its material conditions of production are no different than the production of other knowledge. Futuretypes is evidence of a tyranny of content, imagination, and medium.