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Record W4416411073 · doi:10.1016/j.futures.2025.103737

Yes, but…: Technology, netnography, and futures

2025· article· en· W4416411073 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueFutures · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicComputational and Text Analysis Methods
Canadian institutionsYork University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsNetnographySocial mediaBig dataFutures contractVisionSocial media analyticsRealmContrarianConsumption (sociology)

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

The idea of understanding the emergence of hopeful futures with netnography is no doubt a good one. Although netnography is based on the study of a small group of people, it may help understand where larger groups may be going, based on naturally occurring conversations conducted online. Such public and semi-public discourse tends to be polarized, but the more positive visions may indeed offer hope. In the contrarian view offered here, we temper such optimism with a historical view of prognostication in the realm of consumption and everyday life. We find that the practice of predicting the future has become more quantitative, but no more insightful with the rise of the internet and Big Data analytics. Doing in-depth netnography may, however, help understand how trends form and how they may affect the future as much or more than they predict it. We present a new conceptual understanding of the role of hype and visioneering in creating an atmosphere of excitement toward the latest technological innovation and explain why this is important. • Big Data and marketing analytics offer micro prediction and control but often fail to provide macro understanding. • Netnography offers a deeper, more culturally sensitive, qualitative analysis of social media content. • Social media content may Affect the future as much or more than it predicts it. • Hype cycles for consumer technological innovations are common and create social and traditional media magical excitement. • Visioneering is a technique by which self-fulfilling magical prophesies may be generated by corporations and industries.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.626
Threshold uncertainty score0.529

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.001
Science and technology studies0.0010.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.007
GPT teacher head0.356
Teacher spread0.349 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it