Contemporary social and cultural life is increasingly organised around a logic of self-transformation, where changing the body is seen as key. Analysing different screens across popular culture - the screens of shopping, makeover television programmes, online dieting plans and government health campaigns - it traces how images of self-transformation bring the future into the present and organise an imperative for transformation to make possible, or not, the materialisation of a better future.

Acknowledgements. Introduction: Transformation, Potential, Futures 1. Screening Affect: Images, Representational Thinking and the Actualization of the Virtual 2. Bringing the Image to Life: Interactive Mirrors and Intensive Experience 3. Becoming Different: Makeover Television, Proximity and Immediacy 4. Immanent Measure: Interaction, Attractors and the Multiple Temporalities of Online Dieting 5. Pre-Empting the Future: Obesity, Prediction and Change4Life. Conclusion: Transforming Images: Sociology, the Future and the Virtual. Bibliography. Index.

Rebecca Coleman is a lecturer in the Department of Sociology, Lancaster University. Her research is concerned with theoretical and empirical explorations of the relations between bodies and images, with a particular focus on temporality. Publications include The Becoming of Bodies: Girls, Images, Experience (2009, Manchester University Press).