How Would Communities Anticipate ‘Democracy’ as a Desirable Futures?

Abstract

In Anticipatory Democracy research (Bezold, 2010, 2128; Toffler, 1978), both conceptual and methodologic research on the ‘desirable futures’ have roots in meaning and value co-creation. This panel offers a joint framework of studying the convergence of theories about how humans achieve the desirable futures, how they get to share values, beliefs and attitudes, and how they make the meaning of it in the hybrid and virtual environments. To this purpose, the panel suggests two perspectives: (1) the community and narrative as the social roots of building the desirable futures, and (2) the human mind and the imagination able to make sense of scenario development as the way to make both individuals and communities share the meaning of their visions about a common future. This panel brings together research approaches on the desirable futures from three distinct areas: (1) community foresight and scenario development in participatory communities in the hybrid and virtual environments, (2) cinematography and filmmaking, and (3) AI-based modelling and simulation of meaning and value co-creation. 1 - Community Foresight. As a way of anticipating how democracy would look like in distant time, the design and achievement of “desirable futures” has a strong methodological background in scenario development (Bishop et al., 2007). Much more than other anticipatory methodologies, scenario development allows for the conceptual as well as practical construction of a vision about what is desired, what holds a strong significance and value, and what is accepted and shared by a comunity. 2 - Film & Media. Distinguishing itself by being the first to fully conceptualize the human agent in the virtual worlds and achieve pragmatic procedural approaches on how these virtual environments could describe and enhance meaning-making, cinematography and film theory, filmmaking and film producing provide for complex approaches on how human mind and human society adapts to the virtual reality by meaning and value co-creation. When watching a movie, we usually perform meaning-making in virtual environments even if ‘meaning-making’ is a different process often marked by adaptations, intertextual references, remixing and many other procedures. We are able to co-create meaning aside the filmmakers and screenwriters even if we do not communicate with them directly, but with the characters and worlds they create in the virtual and we watch them on the screen as being alive. 3 - Scenario Development. Modelling and simulation for scenario development about meaning-making in virtual reality is essential for understanding social and political participation in hybrid and virtual environments. Called upon facing the challenge of the ‘artificial intelligence and life’, individuals as well as communities and entire societies struggle to adapt to environments which brings new concepts of ‘space’, ‘time’ and ‘life’, and new ways of meaning and value co-creation. Artificial anticipatory system should achieve anticipatory capabilities by proving able to acquire, understand and maintain value sets, to achieve reasoning abilities based on knowledge, and to co-create meaning and value by adapting to the specific contexts in hybrid and virtual environments (Voinea, 2021, 2025).

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