This book deals with the connection between media and the future. It is about the imagination of futuristic media and what this says about the present, but it also shows how media are imagined as means to control the future. The authors discuss the theories of imagination and how the imagination of media futures operates.

Chapter 1 - Introduction.- Chapter 2 - Media Change as a Cultural Phenomenon.- Chapter 3 - Imagination and Future Media.- Chapter 4 - The Future of Digital Media.- Chapter 5 - Future Media: Radical Imagination and 'Immutable Futures'.

This book deals with the connection between media and the future. It is about the imagination of futuristic media and what this says about the present, but it also shows how media are imagined as means to control the future. The book begins by describing different theories of the evolution of media and by exploring how this evolution is tied to expectations regarding the future. The authors discuss the theories of imagination and how the imagination of media futures operates. To do so, they analyse four concrete examples: the imaginations once related to interactive television and how they were performed in an important piece of media art; those on “ubiquitous computing,” which remain present today; those on three-dimensional, especially holographic, displays that are prevalent everywhere in cinema, and lastly the contemporary imaginations on quantum computing and how they have been enacted in science fiction. The book appeals to readers interested in the question of how our present imagines its technological futures.

Christoph Ernst is Associate Professor for Media Studies at the University of Bonn, Germany. His main research interests are information visualization, interface studies, media theory, and future studies.

Jens Schröter is Chair for Media Studies at the University of Bonn. His main research interests are digital media, future studies, and critical media studies.

“At a moment of rampant futurology and technophilia in response to pandemic crisis, Media Futures is necessary reading. Innovatively rethinking the relationship between "new" and "future", the book makes a necessary and important intervention into how we study (and imagine) media change. Schröter and Ernst vividly demonstrate the way discourses of “new media” foreclose alternative media systems and futures by substituting consumption, versioning, and planned obsolescence in the present, for emergence, change, and difference in the future. Against this tendency to destroy the future in the name of a speculative present, they offer vivid, articulate, and clearly actionable alternative models for creating different imaginaries of media and time for the future.”

-          Dr. Orit Halpern, Associate Professor, Concordia University, Canada

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