David H. Rosen's blog

People born before 1992 were left feeling like geezers last week with the release of the famous Beloit College "Mindset List." Now in its 12th year, the list aims to help professors understand the unique perspectives of their incoming freshman.

In deficit debates, you hear a lot about how we're "borrowing against our children's future." The counterpoint being (crashes aside)since the economy has always grown more efficient in the past, it will continue to do so in the future and we can pay off today's debt with tomorrow's increases in productivity.

So where does this belief come from?

Social networking is now more popular online than email and pornography. But while much of its growth is simply people connecting to friends or reading blogs to do their jobs better, an ideology about social media has taken root. And it’s flourishing largely by offering a utopic vision of the future.

Welcome! I’m delighted to re-launch my Selling Tomorrows blog on the World Future Society’s new website. As you may know from posts during the beta, I study futurism but am not a futurist.

I don’t create visions of tomorrow -- I take them apart to learn why they work.

Why? So glad you asked.

My apologies for skipping out on posts the last month...I've been working on a very exciting white paper that has entered the wild today: The CMO's Guide to Tweetups.  Nine delicious pages chock full of research, rationales, strategies and tactics designed to help companies launch their own tweetups. 

Tom Friedman has an excellent column today comparing the
application of Dick Cheney's "One Percent" Doctrine on terrorism to
climate change.  As Friedman explains, the question is what to do
about potential events that are unlikely to happen, but if they do the
fallout would be catastrophic.

With that in mind, he counters about the downside if we're wrong on climate change:

There was a gem of a quote in today's NY Times coverage of the Obama's state dinner hosting India.  The First Lady, talking to some schoolchildren, said:

(What?  You don't know what the heck "Eschatological" means either?  Let's ask our friends at Wikipedia: 

I’ll skip the poetry and just try and convey what went
through my mind through the launch. 

Given some stereotypes of social media users (I just told
a reporter from the German Press Agency that the Star Trek ones are
true :) ) this group is not a bunch of people who prefer to stare at their
iPhones instead of making eye contact.  In fact, their most defining
characteristic is the ability to have a great conversation.  They're
interesting and interested.  Their hyper sharing online translates into
hyper helpfulness offline.  And given the friendly nature of the
technical social channels, there's much more of a "we're all in this