Futures already present: Rethinking media studies in an era of anticipation

Gudrun Frommherz, 2026

Editorial for the Journal of Creative Economy & Media Studies 1(1)

Media studies and research on creative industries tend to focus on retrospective inquiry, aiming to understand developments after they have taken place—or, at best, as they happen. As a result, communication and media scholars often analyse strategies already implemented, observe industry transformations as they unfold, examine technologies once they have reached critical mass, or study audiences when behavioural changes become apparent. Similarly, scholarship on creative industries—and broader creative economies—commonly employs post hoc analysis, even within strategic planning and policy development. Take innovation studies as a case in point: although innovation is inherently linked to future change and economic potential, the field’s approach largely relies on decades-old models and theories, such as twentieth-century ideas of economic growth and national innovation systems that emerged in the 1990s.

The reflective-analytical perspective has a long tradition. Social science research has customarily been more explanatory than predictive. Media studies historically developed as an interpretive field mainly centred on analysing current media systems rather than systematically exploring future directions (e.g., Huhtamo, 1997; Gitelman, 2006; Williams, 1983). Likewise, creative economy studies originated from policy-driven initiatives rather than predictive theories of cultural or economic transformation (e.g., Cunningham, 2002; Hesmondhalgh, 2019; Pratt, 2005). These fields rely on available data and measurable outcomes to stay empirically relevant. In academia, media studies and creative industries research often falls behind because of slow institutional procedures and lengthy publication timelines. This delay causes scholars to concentrate on phenomena that have already settled enough for detailed analysis. By the time research is published, media environments or practices may have already evolved. One of academia’s traditional strengths, namely, thorough retrospective analysis, is now challenged by the rapid pace of media change and the increasing significance of the creative industries as pillars of sustainable economic development.

Nonetheless, retrospective analysis of media communication and creative economies continues despite the recognition that media industries increasingly operate through futures (Couldry & Hepp, 2017; Mosco, 2004; Van Lente & Rip, 1998). There are many examples: during the 1970s and 80s, the idea of a paperless office foreshadowed the widespread adoption of digital document management, from desktop publishing and online news to cloud storage. The metaphor of the information superhighway in the 1990s justified substantial investments in telecommunications and accelerated the implementation of global internet infrastructure. Imagining widespread media convergence encouraged cross-media ownership, the development of smartphones and streaming services, and the reorganisation of journalism into integrated multimedia newsrooms. Today’s metaverse experiments demonstrate how imagined futures shape emerging media realities, transforming virtual participation into immersive, embodied experiences well before they become practical. In literature and entertainment, science fiction has long inspired media innovation—think Star Trek’s mobile communicator and touchscreen tablet, gesture-based interfaces in Minority Report, or conversational AI in 2001: A Space Odyssey, which is now further normalised in Black Mirror’s concepts of synthetic media and digital afterlives. 

Yet media studies still mainly concentrates on the past and present, paying too little attention to how societies respond to imagined futures. These visions of the future, described by Beckert (2016) as ‘fictional expectations’, exert a forward-pulling force that directs and legitimises current strategy, investment, policy and institutional structures. Anticipated or imagined futures thus act as reference points guiding current actions and setting the present on a directional course long before they are realised. The science and technology scholar Sheila Jasanoff (2015) argued that societies in technocentric economies organise themselves around shared ‘sociotechnical imaginaries’—envisioned futures that motivate and prefigure today’s decisions. This perspective is significant: the co-production of media evolution through interactions among technological innovation, institutions and audiences is also a co-creation across embedded histories, present realities and possible futures. These temporal interactions produce ‘present futures’ (Brown & Michael, 2003): anticipatory narratives that define the horizon of expectation but also limit imagination of what is possible (Borup et al., 2006; Koselleck, 2004). Although ‘present futures’ may seem like an oxymoronic pun, the term nevertheless captures the coexistence of different temporal layers within technologically mediated life. Rather than representing fixed points along a linear timeline, past, present and future interact through memories, experiences, hopes and imagination, forming a dynamic temporal field in which each continually reshapes the others. From this perspective, the widespread assumption that futures do not yet exist appears ontologically limited and analytically restrictive.

Accepting futures as fundamentally embedded in the present and inseparable from it, media studies and creative industries research should recognise ‘futuring’ as a valid—and necessary—form of scholarly inquiry. If expectations and future potential actively organise current media environments and steer creative economies, then they are not merely speculation but empirical forces that co-create realities—Jasanoff’s point, precisely. These futures are therefore not simply potential destinations towards which techno-economic systems evolve but active agents in shaping how those systems are designed and governed.

This perspective encourages a shift from viewing futuring as a predictive method to analysing media futures as objects of study within media research. Futuring does not aim to forecast technological advancements or identify the next disruptive innovation. Instead, it explores how specific futures are constructed, which futures become visible and authoritative, whose interests they promote, what assumptions they encode about technology, society and economic progress, and which alternative futures are marginalised or rendered impossible. Futuring thus offers a way to analyse ideology and power by demonstrating how anticipatory narratives shape current decisions through resource allocation and the justification of interventions, and by portraying certain development paths as necessary or inevitable.

For media studies, this means more than just adding another research topic. It offers an expanded analytical perspective that complements existing approaches by examining the temporal forces that shape media systems. A futures-oriented media scholarship would explore not only what media technologies might become but also how expectations of what they should become influence their development from the outset. Such an approach connects media innovation, political economy and critical futures research within a shared framework, allowing scholars to study how technological ideologies, institutional ambitions, economic interests and sociopolitical structures come together to create specific media futures while excluding alternative trajectories.

Rather than positioning media futures as a separate subfield concerned primarily with anticipating technological developments, futuring should be seen as a fundamental epistemological activity within media scholarship and creative industries studies. Futuring as a research methodology acknowledges that today’s media worlds cannot be fully understood without critically examining how futures are imagined and negotiated. In increasingly future-oriented societies, where promises of sustainable innovation and growth shape contemporary decision-making, media futures are not just analytical concerns located ahead of the present; they are epistemological entities through which the present itself becomes knowable.

Here, media studies can draw on the science and technology studies tradition of ‘epistemic objects’, which originates in Rheinberger’s (1997) work on scientific practice. Epistemic objects are not fixed entities waiting to be discovered; rather, they are open-ended moments of inquiry whose meanings develop through ongoing processes of investigation and interpretation. Applied to media futures, imagined futures can be regarded as epistemic objects through which current media realities gain significance. Their importance lies not in whether they ultimately materialise, but in how they influence present actions by shaping perceptions of what is possible, desirable, or necessary. Studying media futures thus reveals not only what might happen next, but also how societies build knowledge about preferable futures and, in doing so, shape today's media worlds. It involves examining how imagined futures organise current realities—and how the futures we envisage are already affecting the media environments we inhabit.

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