Exploring socio-technical future scenarios in the media: the energy transition case in Italian daily newspapers

Abstract

The importance of expectations for the future is well recognised within the social sciences. Future scenarios as well as expectations are relevant components of emerging technoscientific innovations to be investigated. The investigation of expectations has been translated into a useful perspective for the sociological gaze seeking insights about innovation processes. In general, a relevant data source about discourses contributing to the construction of innovation networks is the discourse brought up by mass media. Therefore, we selected the media as our area of research for investigating socio-technical future scenarios. This presents several research challenges linked to content analysis and trend analysis. We selected three of them, namely: the detection of future scenarios in the media; wherever different representations of future scenarios do exist, whether they are complementary or competing; and whether and how representations of futures outlined in the past can mobilise actors in the present. We addressed these challenges by proposing a combination of research techniques ranging from text mining to social network analysis.