PROFECI · Mediating the Future: The Social Dynamics of Public Projections

People’s lives, both as individuals and at the collective level, are guided by projections about the future. This project aims to understand the complex processes through which projections about political issues, such as the outcomes and implications of elections, referenda, crises or wars, are formulated and negotiated within and through the media. It develops a new interdisciplinary approach and research tools for studying how projections evolve over time and through the contribution of various social actors (such as politicians, experts and journalists), and how they are received and acted upon by the public. The focus is on at least three retrospective case studies (projections about the Brexit referendum; the civil war in Syria; and Donald Trump's presidential bid) as well as three real-time case studies (to be selected based on geopolitical developments), characterised by high-visibility and involving projections with far-reaching implications. PROFECI integrates cutting-edge qualitative, quantitative and automated approaches to capture the interactive process underlying the construction and evolution of public projections, and their reciprocal relationship with people’s expectations and behaviour. It begins with an in-depth investigation of the construction, transformation and reception of projections made by key actors, using textual analysis of the source projections and their journalistic coverage, reconstruction interviews with experts and journalists, and focus groups with public members. The results of this stage inform the development of tools for a large-scale diachronic automated text analysis and panel surveys, which will be applied to the real-time and the retrospective case studies. By elucidating the life cycle of projections in a mediated environment, PROFECI opens up new avenues for understanding and researching adaptive social processes, such as self-fulfilling and self-defeating prophecies, and the role of the media in shaping the future.