The visualization of uncertainty

HIV statistics in public media

Valentin Rauer

pp. 139-154

in: Jeffrey C. Alexander, Dominik Bartmański, Bernhard Giesen (eds), Iconic power, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012

Abstract

Cultural historians have identified two different modes of how societies perceive their history: a circular and a linear mode of time. In circular time, the future just repeats the past, such as in the recurrence of different climate seasons each year. Linear time implies a future that will differ from the past (Koselleck 1979, Pierson 2004). How much it will differ, whether a slow and small aberration or a rapid fundamental rupture, remains uncertain. Societies that have replaced the idea of circular time with the idea of linearity and progress create a vision of the future that lacks predictability and security. By giving up the idea of circularity, modern societies face problematic questions of how to act under conditions of "uncertainty" (Bauman 2007).