This article explores the adaptation of Gérard Genette's concept of narrative prolepsis in the realm of social media as the proleptic technique, demonstrating its effectiveness as a tool for anticipatory rhetoric in digital communication. By analysing selected instances from Twitter and Facebook, the study illustrates how digital utterances employ proleptic cues to capture audience attention and potentially engage audiences. The concept of prolepsis, traditionally associated with narrative foresight in literature, is shown to be effectively transposed into the digital context, where it functions as a mechanism to attract user attention. This adaptation highlights the dynamism of rhetorical strategies in the evolving landscape of digital communication, underscoring the continuity of classical rhetorical principles in new media environments. Future research should incorporate a corpus study, which would allow for an in-depth examination of the diverse array of proleptic cues employed by social media influencers. Furthermore, an exploration into the persuasive efficacy of prolepsis, along with its potential links to reasoning fallacies, could provide intriguing insights. Additionally, an analysis of audience reactions to these cues could contribute to a more holistic understanding of their impact.

The paper presents the results of the research conducted on the extensive corpus of press material. The purpose of the research was to show the frequency of references to the American scientific sources in the Polish press, specifically in popular science articles published in the weekly and daily papers. The analysis covered the period of 1975–2005 (and also the year 2015). The frequency of references to U.S. sources has been contrasted with the results on references to other countries (Poland, the former USSR, and Russia, in particular), as well as with the bibliographic data on the sum of citations of academic papers in individual countries. The research was carried out using quantitative methods (content analysis, bibliographic analysis of citations). The obtained results confirm the preference of the Polish popular science discourse for the sources originating from the Western culture, especially from the United States.