[Air-L] CfP CONVERGENCE Back to the Future: Telling and Taming Anticipatory Media Visions and Technologies

[Christian Pentzold]

CALL FOR PROPOSALS

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

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

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

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 <mailto: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.

For more information please contact christian.pentzold at uni-bremen.de <mailto:christian.pentzold at uni-bremen.de>
The full CFP can be downloaded from here: http://journals.sagepub.com/pb-assets/cmscontent/CON/CfP_Convergence_Back-to-the-Future.pdf <http://journals.sagepub.com/pb-assets/cmscontent/CON/CfP_Convergence_Back-to-the-Future.pdf>


-- 
Prof. Dr. Christian Pentzold

Zentrum für Medien-, Kommunikations- und Informationsforschung | 
Centre for Media, Communication and Information Research
Institut für historische Publizistik, Kommunikations- und Medienwissenschaft | Institute for Historic Journalism, Communication and Media Studies 

Universität Bremen | University of Bremen

Linzer Strasse 4, D-28359 Bremen, Germany
email: christian.pentzold at uni-bremen.de