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Keynote by Andreas Hepp at the Conference of the Italian Sociological Association (AIS) in Bologna

This Thursday, November 5, Prof. Dr. Andreas Hepp will be a guest at the conference “Remix the real: imagination, cultures, mediatization” hosted by the Italian Sociological Association (AIS) in Bologna. He will deliver the keynote as part of the plenary session titled “Drivers of Deep Mediatization: AI, the Quiet Futuring of the Future in Pioneer Communities, and Our Digital Futures”.

Abstract

Our everyday lives are increasingly entangled with digital media infrastructures — a process Andreas Hepp has described as deep mediatization. With the rise of communicative AI (ComAI), this process enters a new stage: media are no longer merely channels for communication but increasingly act as communicative counterparts, reshaping how social reality is produced, narrated, and imagined. This keynote argues that to grasp this shift we must look at the actors who drive it. Pioneer communities — from the Whole Earth network through the Maker and Quantified Self movements to today’s AI scenes in Silicon Valley and beyond — do more than build technologies. They cultivate and circulate visions of digital futures, quietly futuring the future by remixing present realities into imagined ones that then feed back into how societies act. Drawing on his forthcoming book Pioneer Communities (Polity, 2026), Andreas Hepp traces how this quiet futuring becomes a powerful force in the ongoing remix of the real, turning private projections into shared societal imaginaries. He closes by asking what this means for our digital futures — and whose imagination ultimately gets to shape them.

More info on the conference at the Italian Sociological Association (AIS).