Imagining 2076
Encouraging storytelling and narratives about pro-topian futures in Hollywood.
Nearly half of Americans receive their civic information outside of traditional education and news media. Only 59% of Americans reported taking a civics education class in high school in 2021. This coincides with decreasing trust in traditional news media: 38% of Americans said they often or sometimes avoid the news in 2022 with only 42% saying they trust most news most of the time. Entertainment media, therefore, plays an essential role in developing Americans' understanding of whether, and how, our civic institutions are a place of cooperative problem-solving or a vehicle of division and self-aggrandizement
The key mandate of Imagining 2076 is simple: how can the stories we tell about democracy and the future empower Americans to reimagine democracy for the next generation? In partnership with Harmony Labs, a non-profit media research organization, we will develop methodologies to code and quantify various depictions of government (from authoritarian to democratic) and depictions of the future (from protopian to dystopian), and to test their impact on audiences’ attitudes about democracy, hope for the future, and desire to participate in democracy.
Where We Are Going
Moving forward we will continue to partner with Harmony Labs and use their robust values-based audience segmentation and associated media content engagement data to make a compelling business case to Hollywood that there is a market for pro-topian depictions of government and the future by:
Further exploring specific audiences where we did not find media that moved them on questions of agency and imagination for the future;
Building partnerships with studios and helping them establish internal research systems to understand the impact of their content before it hits the market;
Serving as a bridge between experts in democracy and creatives, providing, for example, topical workshops for writers in partnership with democracy organizations; and
Layering more traditional demographic data over values-based audiences to ensure partners in the democracy field are able to utilize our findings in their own messaging efforts.
Building on the lessons we will learn through the above activities, will help us imagine alternative, pro-topian futures and allow Americans to believe an effective, representative, and responsive democracy is possible and work towards it through Constitutional change and sustain it through our work on political realignments.
Possible future expansions of this work include a deeper dive into the media consumption of those who are authoritarian minded to determine if the narratives we identified in their film/TV viewing are the same in other media they’re consuming (e.g. social media, video games, podcasts etc.). This next phase would give us guidance of the types of additional partnerships we might want to create to impact other types of media. For example, in the creator space, we look forward to partnering with Beyond Conflict, whose work will be using our forthcoming research and advice. In addition, we are exploring the following activities:
Regular briefings for content creators across industries;
Content development contests; and
The publication of a compilation of stories, art, and other media depicting a future US over the next 50 years where democracy is responsive, effective and representative.
Our Partner
Imagining 2076
Harmony Labs — Harmony Labs is a media research lab, using science, data, and creativity to research and reshape our relationship with media. For more than a decade, Harmony Labs has helped storytellers and strategists, decision makers and dreamers, harness the immense power of media to shape a positive, pluralistic future. With the Narrative Observatory, for the first time ever, Harmony Labs is harnessing powerful industry relationships to deliver one-of-a-kind data infrastructure that empowers partners to find, reach, and resonate with the right audience in today’s media minefield. The Narrative Observatory delivers audience-based insights, narrative and network analysis, and empirical validation of cultural strategy and content—all derived from the actual behavior of real people and true audiences, not survey results, demographic groups, or inauthentic online activity.