ICT, Public Administration and Democracy in the Coming Decade

Yogi Berra was famous both as a baseball player and as a source of enigmatic epigrams which often carried a subtle truth. One of his most famous observations was that “the future ain’t what it used to be”. Translated, what Berra was saying was that our view of the future changes all the time and yesterday’s forecasts are often today’s source of wry amusement. For this reason amongst others, many academics believe that serious scholars should never attempt to write about the future or at least not beyond the short term. Longer term, events are all too likely to prove them wrong. The future is the domain of fortune tellers, tarot readers, astrologists and other non-scientific producers of “knowledge”; serious researchers should stay away from it. No empirical data about the future can be gathered and, as a consequence, it can never be investigated. Science should be about presenting adequate accounts of external reality on the basis of systematic empirical research. On the other hand academic scholarship is about theory and good theory is, inter alia, about prediction. And there is a great need for knowledge about the future. Knowledge about the future is important to strategists, technology developers, managers, politicians, policy-makers and ordinary citizens as a basis for informed decision making. In the domain of public administration, knowledge about the future is not only needed for policy-making, but also for an informed public debate about the desirability of certain trends and the need for a public response. Knowledge about global warming stands out as a type of knowledge that is desperately needed to guide our behavior and decisions. We need information about the dilemmas we may be facing in the future in order to make informed choices today about the development and use of new technologies. One problem for social scientists in general and for those that study new technologies in particular in that we are shooting at a moving target. We can study the present and the past, but when it comes to technology a question arises as to how reliable knowledge is when it comes to predicting the future.