Economic communication and young people’s perception of the future

Abstract

This paper investigates how economic insecurity is discursively produced and affectively circulated in Lithuania’s public sphere, with a particular focus on young people’s epistemic and emotional exposure to these narratives. Drawing on qualitative content analysis of digital news media and expert-authored Facebook discourse, the study approaches economic discourse not merely as a reflection of macroeconomic facts but as an affective infrastructure that shapes the interpretive environment in which individuals assess risk and agency. The research design is inductive, allowing discursive patterns to emerge from the data without pre-imposed categories. The central research objective is to identify what types of public messages provoke the feeling of economic insecurity; how media and social media narratives reinforce or contradict each other; which broader discursive models emerge from these patterns; and how a more ethically grounded economic discourse could be articulated. The findings suggest that messages combining technocratic information with emotional or moralised framings are particularly potent in producing a sense of vulnerability. Although the genres differ, traditional media and social media tend to reinforce each other’s affective load, generating a feedback loop of institutional delegitimation, systemic exposure, and fatalistic affect. The study identifies four dominant discursive formations — structural delegitimation, systemic exposure, affective ambivalence, and conditional resilience — each shaping economic subjectivity in distinctive ways. These formations do not merely communicate uncertainty; they structure the limits of future-oriented thinking and constrain perceived economic agency, especially for younger audiences. The paper concludes by proposing a set of communicative principles for epistemically responsible and affectively sustainable public discourse, emphasising tonal proportionality, generational inclusiveness, and narrative pluralism.