[ecrea] Call for Proposals: Special Issue of "Convergence": Back to the Future: Telling and Taming Anticipatory Media Visions and Technologies

Back to the Future: Telling and Taming Anticipatory Media Visions and 
Technologies

Special Issue of "Convergence: The International Journal of Research 
into New Media Technologies"

Guest-editors: Christian Pentzold (University of Bremen, Germany), Anne 
Kaun (Södertörn University, Sweden), and Christine Lohmeier (University 
of Bremen, Germany)

Digital media, networked services, and aggregate data are beacons of the 
future. These incessantly emerging tools and infrastructures project new 
ways of communication, bring unknown kinds of information, and open up 
untrodden paths of interaction. Yet digital technologies do not only 
forecast uncharted times or predict what comes next. They are, it seems, 
both prognostic and progressive media: they don’t await the times to 
come but realize the utopian as well as dystopian visions which they 
have always already foreseen. At the same time, all calculation of 
anticipations has to rely on past data that profoundly shape our ability 
to manage expectations and minimize uncertainties.

In these fast forward dynamics, the special issue of Convergence 
examines the futuremaking capacity of networked services and aggregate 
data. We ask contributions to consider: What role do digital 
technologies and data play in the construction and circulation of future 
knowledge, e.g., through forecasting, modelling, prediction, or 
prognosis? What expectations and anticipatory visions such as promise or 
warning do accompany the creation and diffusion of new media? Over the 
course of history, which imaginaries of social and technological futures 
have been propelled by the media innovations at that time? How do new 
media technologies and discourses contribute to the production and 
reproduction of social time that is future oriented? How do they impact 
on the ability to exert control over the future?

Papers in this special issue will explore the future making dimension of 
new media and may include the following topics:

• Role of media in reconfiguring the relations and distances among 
present, past, and future times
• Communicative construction of differently vast and (un)certain 
horizons of expectation
• Data-based modes of anticipation (e.g., prognosis, prediction, 
prevention, precaution, pre-emption); calculative practices and other 
kinds of speculative accounts of possible events
• Historical succession of past future visions around media innovations 
and mediated social life
• Imaginaries of futures related to digital media
• Interventions into the plans, efforts, and processes of constructing 
futures
• Backwards-orientation of forecasting and conservative aspects of 
future scenarios
• New media in the production of simultaneity, coincidence, or 
(non)contemporaneity

Submissions:
Proposals should include the author's name and affiliation, title, an 
abstract of 500 words, and 3 to 5 keywords, and should be sent to the 
e-mail address no later than 1 December 2018: (mediatizedtime /at/ uni-bremen.de)
Invited paper submissions will be due 1 June 2019 and will undergo peer 
review following the usual procedures of the journal. The invitation to 
submit a full article does not guarantee acceptance into the special issue.
The special issue will be published in 2020. All inquiries should be 
sent to: (christian.pentzold /at/ uni-bremen.de).

Download the Call for Proposals here: 
http://www.zemki.uni-bremen.de/fileadmin/redak_zemki/dateien/Dateien-News/CfP_Convergence_Back-to-the-Future_ZeMKI.pdf



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