High Risk, Strong Belief: Images of the Future in the Media Industry

When planning for the future, media managers must balance realism with the need to foresee unexpected changes. This article investigates images of the future in the Norwegian media industry in the early years of the 21 st century and identifies five key trends that media managers envisioned: personalized content, user-generated content, rich media, cross-platform media , and mobility . We argue that increased reflection on such visions and how they are formed may put managers (and researchers) in a better position to meet the future. We therefore ask to what degree they were influenced by actual developments at the time, or anchored in more classical imagery of the future. The analysis illustrates how new technologies become focal points for articulating old dreams about the future. At the latest turn of the century, the mobile phone served as such a focal technology.