Imagining and instituting future media : Introduction to the special issue

• In our fast-forward times, the special issue ‘Back to the Future: Telling and Taming Anticipatory Media Visions and Technologies’ examines the future-making capacity of networked services and digital data. Its contributions ask about the role media play in forecasting the future and their part in bringing it about. And they are interested in the expectations and anticipatory visions that accompany the formation and spread of new media. Along these lines, the eight articles in this special issue explore the future-making dimension of new media. As a whole, they provide an empirically grounded analysis of the ways media reconfigure the relations and distances among present, past, and future times. The contributions delineate imaginaries of futures related to digital media. Furthermore, they attend to interventions into the plans and efforts of making futures and they inquire about the creation of differently vast and (un)certain horizons of expectation. Together, the articles share the assumption that mediated futures are actively accomplished and enacted; they do not simply appear or wait for us to arrive in them.

Subject headings

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Medie- och kommunikationsvetenskap (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Media and Communications (hsv//eng)

Keyword

Anticipation

digital media

future

media innovations

media visions

preemption

premediation

social imaginaries

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

art (subject category)