Road-mapping the societal transformation potential of social media Toni Ahlqvist, Asta Ba ¨ ck, Sirkka Heinonen and Minna Halonen Abstract Purpose – This paper seeks to discuss the outcomes of a road-mapping research on social media project completed at VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland. Social media refer to a combination of three elements: content, user communities, and Web 2.0 technologies. Design/methodology/approach – The paper utilizes socio-technical road-mapping to study the potential transformations of social media in the virtual and physical spheres. Findings – Road-maps were constructed in three thematic areas: society, companies, and local environment. The results were crystallized into five development lines. The first development line is transparency and its increasing role in society. The second development line is the rise of a ubiquitous participatory communication model. The third development is reflexive empowerment citizens. The fourth development line is the duality of personalization/fragmentation vs mass effects/integration. The fifth development line is the new relations of physical and virtual worlds. Originality/value – The study of social media has been focusing mainly on its technological aspects from the current perspective. This paper forms a future-oriented perspective to social media in a wider societal context. Keywords Social networks, Electronic media, Transformational leadership, Innovation Paper type Research paper 1. Introduction Practices induced by social media have potential to open up a new virtual culture of participation. The development is already under way – there are massive amounts of applications that can be used to share, compare and exchange information, opinions, gossip, pictures, and user generated videos and programs. Social media channels are widely used as spaces for self expression and grass-root activism. Social media applications have also resulted in disruptions in business models of cultural industries, e.g. in music production. The outcomes have been ambiguous – blooming peer-to-peer sites have caused debates on the inflation of IP rights. There are virtual idea laboratories and open source communities developing products in open collaboration. Further, leading companies have taken the approaches enabled by social media applications, such as crowd sourcing and interacting with trusted user communities, as parts of their R&D toolkits. In this article we open future oriented perspectives to the potential societal practices induced by social media. We argue that some of these practices could stir changes beyond the virtual sphere. The virtual and the physical spaces are intermingling in new kinds of ways in the future. This means that practices now common in social media, such as community-based communication and collaboration, rating, tagging, enriching messages and so on, are entering – some rapidly, some more slowly, some in a changed form – the physical space of daily life. This can happen in multiple ways: users leave virtual tags on the physical space for others to follow, selected fractions of urban space could be crowded with interactive monitors, consumer packages could include holographic user interfaces and DOI 10.1108/14636681011075687 VOL. 12 NO. 5 2010, pp. 3-26, Q Emerald Group Publishing Limited, ISSN 1463-6689 j foresight j PAGE 3 Toni Ahlqvist and Asta Ba ¨ck are based at VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, Turku, Finland. Sirkka Heinonen is based at Finland Futures Research Centre, Turku School of Economics, Helsinki, Finland. Minna Halonen is based at VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, Turku, Finland. Received: 2 September 2009 Revised: 29 January 2010 Accepted: 5 February 2010