London Futures Symposium #3: Gender, Media & Identity

After lunch at the London Futures Symposium, the third presentation was given by Dr. Trudy Barber who discussed her long-term research in a presentation titled “The Future of Gender, Media and Identity”.

I understand Dr. Barber has been looking at this issue - as a confluence of themes and specifically in relation to information technology and social computing - for at least the last eighteen years which allowed her to offer us an important evolutionary perspective on this topic.

While clearly a complex set of themes, I liked the emphasis this presentation placed on a key part of our social futures. Indeed, it struck me that gender and identity are embodied components of our ‘daily’ perception, understanding and engagement with future themes, though clearly as we saw from the presentation, not static ones.

I took away a couple of key ideas I’d like to think through further:

1 - That - while each of us represents a ’singular root’ - we become the source from which an emergent range of “fractal digital identities” stem. Such identities can be viewed as both playful and also ones exhibiting a “plasticity of form”. How would / does such a fluid conceptualisation of personal identity effect our understanding of the future? (or indeed futures - one for each identity we self-represent).

2 - We should watch-out for the ‘mediation processes’ which are used to both co-join and move between the three themes.

3 - While using media we tend to engage through some form of interface but - in relation to a cultural definition & understanding of that interface rather than just a simple ICT categorisation - “the social meaning arrives once it becomes embedded in social practices”.  This has resonance when we consider the metaverse and, what Barber describes as “immersive and non-immersive virtuality”.

4 - Deviate to innovate. Where could you apply that maxim, right now?

A challenging presentation, that left me primarily considering the relationship between the personal (in potentially many and fluid forms) to the systemic.

Dr. Barber is also organising a Creative Digital Practice and Theory mash-up at Portsmouth University in February 2009.