Imagining and instituting future media: Introduction to the special issue

Abstract

<jats:p> 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. </jats:p>

Digital Limit Situations

“…Due to the anticipatory features of data and predictive modelling, however, the relationship between media and the future is changing. This has in turn prompted a tide of explorations of the future tense in media studies (see for example Andrejevic 2019, Hong and Szpunar 2019, Zylinska 2020, Pentzold, et al 2020, to which I also hope to contribute. AI is anticipatory media in several senses.…”

Data centers and the infrastructural temporalities of digital media: An introduction

“…Current practices of automated data tracking, data processing, and algorithmic decision-making appeal to industries and institutions around the world today, not only as sources of “objective knowledge” about anything, but also because of their promise to transform the temporalities of knowing. The prospect of owning and using digital data has established pre-emption as “the present future” (Pentzold et al, 2020) around which media, citizens, and organizations are algorithmically assembled and classified in relation to categories of risk and economic value (Amoore, 2013; Cevolini and Esposito, 2020; Ziewitz and Singh, 2021). Understanding how data-driven knowledge production is establishing pre-emption as a mode of governing and organizing populations today has become a central question in critical data studies and adjacent fields.…”