Ultimately the future tends to be painted with a sly, dystopian brush; science fiction films invite their audience to feel coldly uncomfortable about what’s to come – albeit with questionable accuracy! Science fiction media are marketed as futuristic, but effectively capture the present instead. 

There’s something hugely ironic about live-tweeting (i.e. in the present) science-fiction films that are predicting the future, which actually represent the present more than anything else, and then going back over these tweets to reflect on them as a past experience. Eight weeks into the semester, I have a vast collection of observations to share, after viewing and recording various science fiction films during BCM325: Future Cultures.

Live tweeting in this class (actually, live tweeting films anywhere in “Mam-you’re-in-the-cinema-your-phone-needs-to-be-turned-off” culture) is weird. As each film unravelled on the projector, twenty-something students were plugging their own experiences through various invocations onto Twitter; fingers tapping across a…