MEDIATING THE FUTURE: THE SOCIAL DYNAMICS OF PUBLIC PROJECTIONS
The PROFECI Team
People's lives, both as individuals and at the collective level, are guided by projections about
the future: What we believe will happen influences how we act – be it to attain, prepare for
or avert expected outcomes; in turn, our collective actions continuously reshape what appear to be
likely future developments. PROFECI sets out to study the adaptive
▸social dynamics whereby societies anticipate
and thereby shape their own futures
, and the pivotal role of the media in this process.
It develops an
▸interdisciplinary approach
and new
▸research tools
for studying how projections about the outcomes and implications of significant events evolve
through the interaction of various social actors, and how they are received and acted upon by the
public, possibly resulting in self-fulfilling and self-defeating dynamics. Its
▸design
combines the study of past debates about projected futures with the real-time investigation
of present future-oriented discourse.
