The MIT Media Lab: techno-dream factory or alienation as a way of life?

Abstract

This article critically analyses the work and the ethos of the MIT Media Lab in the context of globalizing capital and the ICT revolution. It argues that the Media Lab owes its tremendous success in part to the public relations strategies of its founder, Nicholas Negroponte, and to the very real need for the Lab’s products to ‘fill in the gaps’ left by the broad and irregular dynamics of globalization and the ICT revolution. The Media Lab and its research products insert information technologies into the interstices of cultural, social and temporal life, stitching together an ‘informational ecology’ of interconnectivity. This ecology has its own temporality, a synchronized ‘chronoscopic’ temporality or real-time duration that obliterates the many other temporalities that interpenetrate our lives and give them meaning. It is argued the ‘informational ecology’ of interconnectivity constructed by the Media Lab and many other emulative ‘start-ups’, lead not to a world of ‘diversity’ as Negropontean philosophy insists, but a one-dimensional world of alienation.