[Commlist] CfP The Lab's Quarterly special issue “Living in the Present: Presentism, Foreverism, and the Construction of Social Reality”

CfP The Lab's Quarterly special issue “Living in the Present: 
Presentism, Foreverism, and the Construction of Social Reality”

Guest Editors: Marianna Coppola (Giustino Fortunato University); Sabino 
di Chio (University of Bari “Aldo Moro”); Edmondo Grassi (San Raffaele 
University of Rome)

Abstract deadline: November 15, 2026
Abstract length: 4,000 characters, excluding bibliography

Full call: https://thelabsq.sp.unipi.it/LQ/announcement/view/14

The Lab’s Quarterly is an open-access journal. No submission or 
publication fees are charged to authors, and no Article Processing 
Charges (APCs) apply.

Living in the Present: Presentism, Foreverism, and the Construction of 
Social Reality

At the turn of the century, social theory identified the present as the 
key temporal frame of reference for contemporary societies marked by 
high institutional and media complexity. A new configuration thus 
emerged: while classical modernity long conceived of itself as suspended 
in tension toward a promised future, “late” modernity registers a crisis 
of the future, downgraded from a space of possibility to a repertoire of 
threats (economic, ecological, existential). Within this shift, the 
present tends to expand until it comes to constitute the dominant 
horizon of meaning — whether residual or openly claimed. It is 
“absolute” (Heller, 1999) insofar as it is inhabited by individuals 
detached from any other form of belonging; “autarchic” (Laïdi, 2000) 
insofar as it is self-sufficient and capable of substituting for both 
past and future; “extended” (Nowotny, 1989) as a new dimension of 
planning and projection. The suspended time of precarity intersected 
with the instantaneity of digital communication; the hedonistic present 
of consumption ran alongside a revaluation of the present as the 
dimension of lived experience, everyday life, and emotion; the 
constraints of a future imposed in forced stages by twentieth-century 
ideologies crumbled in the instantaneity of daily life. Its dominance 
gave rise to the drift of presentism (Hartog, 2003), a regime of 
historicity in which the short term becomes imperative, compressing the 
entire temporal horizon (Di Chio, 2015) and undermining historical depth 
and the very possibility of change (Leccardi, Jedlowski, Cavalli, 2023).

More recently, algorithmic logic and digital archiving have produced an 
unprecedented form of the eternalization of the present, which some 
contemporary authors and artists have described as foreverism: the 
explicit reference here is to Tanner (2023), who proposes the concept as 
a dominant cultural discourse capable of promising continuity and growth 
without genuine transformation, reducing loss (and hence nostalgia) to a 
problem to be neutralized. Within this framework, Tanner introduces the 
concept of foreverizing: practices that “reanimate” what is degraded or 
has disappeared (for example, cloud archiving, cultural reboots, voice 
cloning), keeping it active within a present that aspires to be 
indefinitely inhabitable. Our own use of the term engages with this 
framework while linking it to the tendency to preserve everything, to 
keep track of every gesture, image, or word, within a digital memory 
that never forgets (Stiegler, 2010; Mayer-Schönberger, 2011; Sisto, 
2018). Foreverism is not simply the opposite of oblivion: it is a form 
of perpetual presence in which time loses directionality and social 
reality is constructed as a flow of simultaneity.

These temporal transformations carry profound implications for the 
construction of social reality (Berger & Luckmann, 1966; Couldry & Hepp, 
2016) and for the structuring of relational architectures of 
post-reality (Grassi, 2022). If time is a constitutive dimension of 
collective experience, then the way we live, represent, and share it 
directly shapes how we produce meaning, memory, and identity. The 
permanent present alters the processes of institutionalization, 
mediatization, the legitimation of knowledge, and the construction of 
symbolic authority. In digital societies, the very notion of reality 
appears more fluid, more contingent, and continually renegotiated in the 
here and now of visibility. The “permanent present” is also a material 
fact: archiving everything entails infrastructures, economies of 
conservation, asymmetries of access, and ecological costs. Digital 
memory is not merely a cultural metaphor but a political issue involving 
platforms, governance, rights, and responsibilities.

In this special issue, we will use “foreverism” in operational sense, as 
a socio-technical regime of permanence: the systemic tendency to retain, 
make searchable, and reactivate traces (data, images, texts), turning 
forgetting into the exception rather than the rule. The focus remains on 
the digital infrastructures of memory and their social and political 
consequences; the aim is to critically explore the nexus between the 
primacy of the present, contemporary temporality, and the construction 
of social reality, questioning how presentism and foreverism are 
redefining the ways in which individuals and collectivities shape the 
social, political, and symbolic world.

The aim is to gather contributions that, from sociological, 
anthropological, communication and media studies, and philosophical 
perspectives, address the transformations of temporality as one of the 
crucial issues of our time: the crisis of the future, the saturation of 
the present, technological acceleration, and the tension between the 
ephemeral and the permanent.

Topics of Interest

* Presentism and temporal regimes: genealogies, conceptualizations, and 
sociological consequences
* Foreverism and digital memory: archives, traces, algorithms
* Presentist temporality and the construction of social reality
* Subjectivity and time: temporal experiences, update anxiety, burnout, 
and everyday chronotopes
* Political temporality: the crisis of the future, populism, 
acceleration, and immobility
* Digital temporality and platforms: social media, algorithms, and the 
production of “real time”
* Ethnographies of time: how communities and bodies negotiate forms of 
temporal manifestations
* Temporality and aesthetics: representations of time in media and the arts
* Posthumanism and technological temporality
* Post-pandemic temporality: discontinuity and the reinvention of social 
time
* The materiality of permanence: infrastructures, data centers, energy, 
ecological impacts, and inequalities of access

Key Deadlines

- November 15, 2026: Submission of structured abstracts with essential 
bibliography.
- December 15, 2026: Notification of abstract acceptance.
- June 15, 2027: Submission of full papers.
- July 20, 2027: Outcome of the first review round.
- September 6, 2027: Submission of revised articles.
- October 11, 2027: Outcome of the second review round.
- December 2027: Publication.

Submission of Contributions

Structured abstracts should be sent to the following e-mail addresses:

Marianna Coppola - (m.coppola /at/ unifortunato.eu)
Sabino Di Chio - (sabino.dichio /at/ uniba.it)
Edmondo Grassi - (edmondo.grassi /at/ uniroma5.it)

Full papers may be written in the following languages: Italian, English, 
and French, and must be submitted to the journal by selecting the 
section “Special Issue – Vivere nel presente” in the submission 
procedure at Make Submission: https://thelabsq.sp.unipi.it/LQ/submission/

Images and tables may be inserted directly into the main document.

The editorial guidelines are available on the web page: 
https://thelabsq.sp.unipi.it/LQ/submission-guidelines

Upon request to the guest editors of the special issue, a Word template 
of the journal will be made available to facilitate formatting.

The Lab’s Quarterly is an open-access journal. No submission or 
publication fees are charged to authors, and no Article Processing 
Charges (APCs) apply.

References

Berger P. L., Luckmann T. (1966), The social construction of reality: A 
treatise in the sociology of knowledge, Anchor Books, New York.
Couldry N., Hepp A. (2016), The mediated construction of reality, Polity 
Press, Cambridge.
Di Chio S. (2015), Tempo irreale. Il restringimento dell’orizzonte 
temporale della tarda modernità, Liguori, Napoli.
Grassi E. (2022), “La costruzione del sociale nell’epoca della 
postrealtà”, SocietàMutamentoPolitica, 13(25) (Oltre le sociologie. 
Dialoghi interdisciplinari su incertezza, rischio e vulnerabilità), 
Firenze University Press, Firenze.
Hartog F. (2003), Régimes d’historicité. Présentisme et expériences du 
temps, Seuil, Paris.
Heller A. (1999), A theory of modernity, Blackwell, Hoboken.
Laïdi Z. (2000), Le sacre du présent, Flammarion, Paris.
Leccardi C., Jedlowski P., Cavalli A. (2023), Exploring new temporal 
horizons: A conversation between memories and futures, Bristol 
University Press, Bristol.
Mayer-Schönberger V. (2011), Delete: The virtue of forgetting in the 
digital age, Princeton University Press, Princeton.
Nowotny H. (1989), Eigenzeit: Entstehung und Strukturierung eines 
Zeitgefühls, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main.
Sisto D. (2018), La morte si fa social. Immortalità, memoria e lutto 
nell’epoca della cultura digitale, Bollati Boringhieri, Torino.
Stiegler B. (2010), For a new critique of political economy, Polity 
Press, Cambridge.
Tanner G. (2023), Foreverism, Polity Press, Cambridge

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