A Futurist’s Summer Reading List

As the summer heat comes blasting across the country, it’s a perfect time to relax in a beach chair by the pool and read a book. Luckily, the World Future Society has a Summer Reading List to help you pick the perfect read. As a bonus, you can come to the WorldFuture 2012 conference in Toronto this July and meet these authors!

Networked: The New Social Operating System

Lee Rainie ( Future of the Internet: Opening Plenary)
May 11, 2012, The MIT Press, with Barry Wellman as coauthor

The persistent chimes and pings of social networks gives us endless opportunities to be a part of the give-and-take of networking. Social interaction is moving to networked individualism, a new social operating system free of the restrictions of tightly knit groups, requiring that people develop networking skills, maintain ties, and balance multiple overlapping networks. This system enables large, loosely knit social circles of networked individuals to expand their opportunities for learning, problem solving, decision making, and personal interaction. Networked delves into the opportunities—and challenges—of the evolving world of networked individuals.

Screen Future

Brian David Johnson (Opening Plenary Session: Waking Up the Algorithm)
August 24, 2011, Intel Press

Screen Future analyzes the technical, economic, and cultural implications of the people, technology, and economics that are shaping the evolution of entertainment. Combining social and computer sciences, media history, and commentary by industry experts, Screen Future explores how our TVs, phones, cars, computers, and the rest of our gadgets are being connected and transformed into personalized—not just personal—devices.

Flash Forward! Rethinking Learning

Karen Grose (Education Summit)
2011, Lantern Resources

The educational needs of children in the twenty-first century are different from those during the Industrial Revolution—when our current education system was developed. Flash Forward provides reasons behind the need for a significant shift in the learning environment and teachers’ roles, as well as examples of implementation to bring these changes about at the classroom, school, and district level.

Reinventing Life: A Guide to Our Evolutionary Future

Jeffrey Scott Coker (Session: Reinventing Life: A Guide to Our Evolutionary Future)

Earth is evolving rapidly—and radically—through the impact of human civilization, giving us responsibilities as evolutionary stewards. Our lives, biology, and the environment are intertwined, and our actions have to potential to restore or further degrade ecosystems, to allow us to live for hundreds of years with regenerative medicine, to enhance ourselves through genetics or robotics, or to introduce new life onto other planets. Our choices will alter the evolution of the world.

How Asia Can Shape the World: From the Era of Plenty to the Era of Scarcities

Joergen Moeller (Session: Asian Economies over the Next Decade)
November 30, 2010, Institute of Southeast Asian Studies

Over the next 25 years, Asia’s economy will need to grow to address financial and social problems. That growth will spur development of a new world center of economic change, but it could come with the price of scarcity of resources. How Asia Can Shape the World discusses the region’s potential for a new economic model that favors less materialistic personal values and shifts productivity from the individual to groups.

You can read more about the book in Books in Brief from the July/August 2011 issue of THE FUTURIST.

Granddad's Farmhouse Porch Stories: Stories of New Beginnings, Beyond Old Endings

Don C. Davis (Session: The Future We Ask For)
March 1, 2012, Turning Stone Press

Nine classic faith narratives are repurposed to align with the progression of science and technology and offer guidance to tomorrow’s global family. With 10 key themes including kindness, honesty, and collaboration, Granddad’s Farmhouse Porch Stories presents fiction to enable and define a positive community of the future.

The Taste of Tomorrow: Dispatches from the Future of Food

Josh Schonwald (Session: Cobia or Barramundi? And Other Choices on Tomorrow’s Menu)
April 10, 2012, Harper

From microfarms to government facilities, The Taste of Tomorrow shows how what we eat today is made—and how what we’ll eat tomorrow is being developed. With scientific, economic, agricultural, and biotech perspectives, Josh Schonwald describes the path new foods have to take to reach our plates. Emerging scientific breakthroughs in genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and processing will drive the development of future foods to feed the world.
You can read an excerpt from The Taste of Tomorrow in the May/June 2012 issue of THE FUTURIST.

The Biggest Wake Up Call in History

Richard A. Slaughter (Session: Global Megacrisis” How Bad Will It Get? What Strategies?) 2010, Foresight International

Civilization will end—unless we restructure how we live, work, play, and even think. The end will come not from a massive nuclear assault but from civilization itself, which has spread out and tapped every resource available—and is still growing, creating an imbalance between our way of life and Earth’s limits. With that stark message, The Biggest Wake Up Call in History addresses the magnitude of today’s global challenges and calls for society-wide mobilization to deal with them.

You can read more about The Biggest Wake Up Call in History on the blog of WFS’s own Rick Docksai and we hope to see you alongside these authors this summer in Toronto!