The Internet of Things, Datafication and the Future of Audiences: A Foresight Analysis Towards 2030

• In Event: Smart Stuff: Internet of Things, Smart Cities, and Urban Broadband Networks

Abstract

The year 2030 seems to be beckoning a fair amount of prospection and critical speculation in policy sectors, with regard to the roles of ICTs in governance, public policy in a variety of sectors, and its interfaces with digital futures in the face of datafication. As scholars located theoretically within the long tradition of audience studies, we report in this paper, from a unique exercise within the field - a foresight analysis conducted by a 29 member European research consortium, on the future of audiences in the year 2030, anticipating the ubiquity of connected technologies and the Internet of Things (IoT), amidst a critical scrutiny of algorithms, datafication and its myriad consequences. Tracing a set of future scenarios along the dimensions of diverging responses to the IoT on the one hand, and the changing nature of institution-individual relationships on the other, we follow a set of 16 drivers of societal change that we suggest will shape the way we study people as audiences as users moving towards 2030.

Authors

• Lucia Vesnic-Alujevic, U of Zagreb

• Gilda Seddighi, University of Bergen

• Ranjana Das, U of Surrey

• David Mathieu, Roskilde U