The Mediatisation of Shared Social Futures

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.