Technological indeterminacy: Medium, threat, temporality

Abstract

For some time now technological determinism, a theory that, broadly speaking, explains the relation between technology and humans in terms of historical causation, has been the target of intense criticism. In this article, I reassess a few of these criticisms in light of what I consider constitutes a new temporal sensibility. Rather than explained in causational terms, I characterize this sensibility as a tendency to place causes in the future. Placing causes in the future means a conversion of technological determinism into an instance of indeterminacy. This then allows religious groups, political actors and global media corporations to act while an imminent future effects the present. Referencing the journalistic mediations by global news broadcasting corporations of events such as the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings or Pastor Terry Jones’s threat to burn copies of the Quran on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, this study focuses on the temporal medium of threat to offer an alternative epistemology on time and mediation in politics, religion and media.