The next speaker at IAMCR 2019 is Motti Neiger, who shifts our focus to the mediatisation of shared social futures in Israel. These represent the mirror image to the well-known idea of collective memory: such shared social futures contain societal fantasies, fears, aspirations, concerns, and expectations instead.
Such shared social futures are not necessarily prevalent only in online media: to overcome their systemic technological disadvantages, newspapers and other print media now often focus their coverage on what will happen next, while online media often report on the immediate past – the things that have just happened.
Visions of the future can be both utopian and dystopian. Collective visions are a socio-political product that are produced through declarative and commissive speech acts. Such narratives construct a bidirectional connection between the past, present, and future that becomes concretised into a functional cultural product. These can be used to sell fear (or hope), and be used to justify anticipatory and preventative actions as well as generating awareness of future issues.
