Futures, communication and social innovation: using participatory foresight and social media platforms as tools for evaluating images of the future among young people

Abstract

As many futurists have argued, images of the future have a crucial role to play in societal development. At an individual level, the understanding of people’s hopes, fears and expectations becomes important not only to determine how we look at the future but also to understand our present actions. At a collective level, sharing these images and understanding our role within the community is also essential for the development of a shared vision about the future. Young people stand out as one of main players in this task of building the society of the future, which is why investigating their images of the future should have highly significant implications. The present paper shows the results of a comparative pilot study about the images of the future found among youngsters from 2 different European countries: Spain and Finland. The survey—which involved two groups of university students from the aforesaid countries—has as its main aim to look into the identified cultural values and message sources that can influence the way in which we look at the (expected and desired) future. The importance of this project, which was developed using the web platform www.F212.org—a pilot project funded by FECYT (Spanish initials for Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology)—stems from the idea that the communication and exchange of information about images of the future through social networks will empower new generations to cope with the challenge of building a desired future.