News about future turmoil: how a hypothetical war is narrated on Finnish news-media websites
In this presentation, I take a look at narratives proliferating in Finnish news-media regarding the security future of Finland, Nato, and “the West” in an age of uncertainty and geopolitical turmoil. A corpus of more than 200 future-oriented texts published since Russian invasion of Ukraine illustrates an emerging journalistic practice of crafting future narratives to disseminate understandable knowledge of the future. Most of the texts included in the corpus narrate some aspect(s) of an imagined future invasion of Finland by Russia.
Future narratives constitute a crucial instrument that affords communicating about the future in a comprehensible way. However, the narrative form also brings with it notable difficulties in this regard. The future is multivalent, changeable, and ultimately unknowable. Because the narrative form is oriented toward retrospective meaning-making, it easily obliterates such qualities in whatever it depicts. In journalistic contexts, this dynamic can present significant challenges when it comes to adhering to epistemic and ethical standards. In the presentation I show how these challenges are (or are not) navigated in contemporary engagement-driven online news-media.
This talk is part of Research Centre Narrere’s Narrative Studies Seminar. The aim of the seminar is to allow for a multi- and interdisciplinary discussion on data, methods, theories, and the state of narrative research. Sessions consist of introductory presentations by researchers from different career-stages and different fields studying narratives at Tampere University (up to 20 min), and general discussion.