Empirically based approaches to I.T. implications restrict the researcher to that which can be observed. This enables the work to be rooted in reality, but it limits the work's relevance. Hence these genres are severely limited in their ability to support the real function of futurism, which is to investigate the impact and implications of both evolutionary and revolutionary change. Speculative I.T. Implications Literatures The largest volume of I.T. implications literature is not strongly empirically based, but rather is speculative. Utopian literature is directly traceable to Plato and Thomas More.
Utopian literature is accessible, exciting and even inspirational.
Generally a degree of systemic or causal reasoning is embedded in the story-line, showing how some future state naturally arises from the intervention. The reader is encouraged to 'suspend disbelief', and accept assumptions, both explicit and implicit, about consequential changes in the social setting. There is an apparent inevitability of the actors' behaviour. Such works focus on the harm that technology is going to do to its social setting. Like the utopian genre, the literary style used is unashamedly polemical, but phrases the speculations as though they were realistic or factual accounts.