Future imaginaries in action: Transformational Social Media Challenges as performative anticipatory infrastructures

Existing scholarship on future imaginaries has largely focused on how imaginaries are formed, circulated, and contested; however, the question of how they become translated into action remains insufficiently theorized. This paper addresses this gap by investigating how future imaginaries are enacted within platform-mediated environments through Transformational Social Media Challenges (TSMCs), a category of Social Media Challenges (SMCs) oriented toward desirable transformations. Drawing on a netnographic study of #fearfood challenges, we examine how future imaginaries of recovery from eating disorders are translated into immediate, embodied, and coordinated forms of action. We argue that TSMCs operate as performative anticipatory infrastructures that compress the temporal distance between present-moment agency and distant future imaginaries. Through the immediacy of dares, the temporally scalable narrative arcs they enact, and their affordance-driven capacity for propagation and social contagion, TSMCs transform desirable future imaginaries into hopeful futures in action, into affective and plausible trajectories that can be collectively enacted and experienced. Our findings identify four interconnected performative dynamics sustaining this process: Embodied Narrative Staging, Temporal Structuring, Affective Mobilization, and Enactment Logics. Together, these dynamics organize participation into repeatable and coordinated practices, enabling individual vulnerability to scale into collective anticipatory agency. We further show how TSMC participants strategically leverage platform affordances and feedback loops to facilitate the enactment of future imaginaries. Finally, the paper highlights netnography as a methodological approach uniquely suited to capturing how even contested and risky platform practices may function as sites for imagining and enacting more hopeful futures.