Tomorrow’s Interactive Television

By John M. Smart

The iPad and its successors could revolutionize television. But only if and when we choose this future.

The elephant in America’s living room right now is that there is not nearly enough quality choice, specialization, and personalization on television. According to many social critics, 70 years of lowest-common-denominator, mass-produced, big-business-driven TV content and news has hobbled Americans’ education and narrowed their worldview. It has stunted their social participation and increasingly distracted them with entertainments, as in decadent Roman times.

Those who want sustained, in-depth television coverage of any particular issue; who want more transparency, accountability, foresight, and the ability to measure progress (in their own or their party’s terms) on an issue; who strive to see the United States in global context; and who desire collective action to fix a problem are today unable to use society’s primary electronic medium. They can’t use it to interact with their fellow citizens or to produce programming worthy of their communities.

As the Internet advances, however, this is beginning to change.

In recent decades, many European and Asian developed countries have become more equitably regulated in media ownership and transparency, and they are much further along in wired and wireless access to the Internet than the United States. Not coincidentally, these countries also have superior educational performance, much stronger social safety nets, more-extensive personal rights, and greater citizen participation in governance. Many, including Germany, the Scandinavian countries, Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore, are centers for world-leading manufacturing run by high-paid workers.

The same can no longer be said for the United States, as demonstrated by the nation’s persistent trade deficits and the 60-year collapse of steel, auto, and manufactured goods industries. Only 4% of all American firms and 15% of manufacturers do any exporting at all, according to Matthew Slaughter of Dartmouth College. The export economy has so little diversity that just 1% of U.S. firms account for 80% of exports.

But perhaps the deepest problem that the United States faces, as documented by the Gini coefficient, is that the rich–poor divide has grown so much in the last 40 years that it now rivals emerging nations, countries like Venezuela, Argentina, China, and Mauritania. Meanwhile, the developed countries mentioned earlier have all become more income equal over the same time period. Data-backed books like Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s The Spirit Level (Bloomsbury Press, 2009) document that income inequality leads to greater crime, educational failure, illiteracy, unemployment, poorer health, teen pregnancy, obesity, mental illness, homelessness, class warfare, and political deadlock.

Ingenuity and the right incentives can fix these problems, but the United States will first need new groups of citizens that recognize them as problems. U.S. leaders don’t have the ability to change the system on their own. Furthermore, as the income gap data suggests, these leaders are increasingly among the ultra rich, so they may not be motivated to change the system.

To change this state of affairs, access to true Internet television, not the walled gardens that cable companies offer American consumers, will be a critical piece of social equity.

I argue that access to the Internet’s media universe in our living rooms, with appropriate content controls for youth, should be the right of every citizen in a developed society. It’s also something that the major telecommunications companies like Verizon and cable companies like Comcast want to slow down, according to testimony from public-interest groups like Public Knowledge, the Center for Public Integrity, and even industry groups like the Competitive Telecommunications Association.

How Television Could Rise From the Wasteland

Robert Putnam’s perceptive book, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (Simon and Schuster, 2001), chronicles the loss of social identity and interpersonal relationship complexity that occurred in U.S. towns and communities from the nation’s 1950s zenith to today’s nadir. Putnam names a number of culprits for this, but principally blames television.

Network television steals our eyeballs out of complex, two-way, social interactions in human space. It focuses us instead on one-way electronic messages. In The Assault on Reason (Penguin, 2007), former U.S. Vice President Gore says that average American consumers have seen a steady loss of complexity in the political conversation in the last 50 years, and the quality of American media is directly to blame. Network television is, on average, a “vast wasteland,” and has been so for decades, as then-newly appointed FCC chairman Newton N. Minow said in his famous speech in 1961.

TV production quality now rivals the movie studios, and programming choice has slowly expanded over the years (as noted in The Economist’s May 2010 report on the future of television, Changing the Channel). But compared with video on the Web, which includes user-created channels like YouTube’s Disco project and peer-to-peer offerings, television is less competitive than it was. Cable television gave U.S. viewers first 50, then 90, then 150 channels of slightly more interesting wasteland.

I argue that access to tens of thousands of specialty channels, a variety of content-aggregation options, and collaborative filtering by peer and trusted expert rankings would better serve U.S. social needs. Such a system will enable all those who wish to do so to eliminate unpersonalized advertising. What we need is two-way communication: person-to-person and many-to-many, not one-to-many. What we need is an electronic re-creation of the interactivity of the 1950s communities that Putnam chronicles, but in digital space, with the modern world’s collective intelligence and diversity. Social networks are a start, but not nearly enough. Web 3.0, comprising TV-quality peer-to-peer video delivered on the Web, will be the next major step in this progression.

Film and television remain among the least competitive and democratic of all media. They have historically high development costs (your average Hollywood movie costs more than $106 million). We’ve seen small cracks in the film distribution monopoly in the last decade, with all the new documentaries produced by “filmanthropists”—folks who mortgage their house and self-finance low-budget films with $100,000 of capital or less. Many of these filmmakers can now make their money back, plus a small profit, just by using the personalized Netflix content distribution and rating system (“you told me you liked this film, so you may also like this new film”), which surfaces such niche films for users to consider. Most of these films would never get on cable TV or the retail floor in any Blockbuster or Hollywood Video store. More recently we also have Netflix’s Watch Instantly (streaming video), iTunes movies, and a few other Internet outlets for independently produced specialty content.

Imagine how much more important, entertaining, and educational video we will see once most of us have Internet televisions at home, managing our access to thousands of online video aggregation environments. Want to see a three- to five-minute public domain film summarizing a Wikipedia page? You’ll be able to pay 25 cents for it through the iTV of tomorrow, and eventually someone will make that film for you (and all of us), and make a profit. The media marketplace will be forever splintered. The old media corporations, and their big federated ad clients, will have given up trying to keep the lid on our choice. The new video universe will finally have arrived for everyone.

The Future of the iPad: How the Television Will Be Revolutionized

Today, 17 years after the Apple “Newton” MessagePad debuted in 1993, tablet PCs like the iPad are poised to live up to the hype that first surrounded them and realize their promise. More than 3 million iPad units sold in its first three months. More-open and diverse Android tablets from more than 20 manufacturers, running software from Apple’s rival Google, are also on the horizon. Uncomplicated and easy to use for brief tasks, tablets seduce us into even more online social interaction, eReading, eLearning, gaming, and other activities, and bring us another step closer to wearable computing.

The iPad’s blockbuster software application is also now evident. The tablet PC is an ideal platform to manage all of the video viewing we will be doing on the Internet televisions that are beginning to arrive in living rooms around the world. This “killer app” seems likely to sell tens of millions of tablets annually as media center computers and iTV roll out across the world in the 2010s. Consider the following facts:

• In 2009, 211 million TVs were sold worldwide. In 2010, 228 million are projected to sell, with 79% being digital-ready LCD TVs. There are now 2.3 billion TVs in the world, and 6.7 billion people.
• Fully 25% of U.S. TVs sold in January 2010 were connected by consumers to the Internet. About 10% of TVs sold came “Internet ready.” The rest, and all our older TVs, are being Internet-connected via set-top boxes, media centers, DVRs, game consoles, and DVD players.
• Today there are 20,000+ streamable Internet TV channels, waiting to be connected to Internet-enabled TVs. With the accelerating popularity of YouTube, Metacafe, Vimeo, Viddler, etc., we can expect, and hope for, more than 100,000 specialized channels by 2015.
• A few companies, like Boxee, have had easy-to-use, open-source Internet media center software since 2008, and are now developing set-top boxes. The best of these include social networking, peer viewing, and chat-while-viewing features and deliver a far more rewarding and personalized viewing experience than cable or satellite TV.
• All media center devices currently use “dumb” remotes with unusable small keyboards, and display their viewing options in large characters, with low resolution, on a distant TV screen. Only one remote can be used at a time, so individual viewers can’t search for or signal what they want to watch next, or multitask on the Internet with their remotes. None of these use the advanced voice command and search software we find on our phones. In short, the television is waiting to be revolutionized by next-generation media centers and tablet remotes.

With the right software, a tablet can rapidly organize the most relevant of 20,000 (or a million) potential channels for the viewer. It can deliver a highly personalized viewing and learning experience while we are in the same room with others who have their own tablets. It can allow social viewing options so rich that we haven’t even fully visualized them yet.

Imagine a tablet that displays what’s on your “top 50” favorite channels on the home screen, and with the next 50 channels or titles just a tap away. With key words, user rating, and community rating as filtering options, all of these video items would be fighting to get higher in your stack depending on your viewing habits, feedback, and interests. Imagine an extensive set of social viewing features (real-time chat, social network integration, video and audio conferencing, peer-to-peer video, etc.) allowing you to watch TV and videos with others, and see what your friends are watching right now. Imagine being able to use your tablet to check the Internet for more on any subject while watching the large screen, just as those with Wi-Fi enabled laptops do today.

In an Internet-enabled, transparent society, advanced content control could create many new communities of specialization. As Adam Smith said in The Wealth of Nations, specialization and hard work are the tried-and-true roads to understanding and mastery of our environment.

Youth today often multitask on the Web when they watch television, and audience share for network television has been falling for more than a decade as consumers’ video options (DVD, DVR, Netflix, the Web) have grown. Nevertheless, according to the American Time Use Survey, in 2008 the average U.S. household still spent roughly 2.9 hours for men and 2.6 hours for women watching television each day. Television viewing remains the single largest discretionary activity that U.S. residents engage in daily, accounting for fully half of daily leisure time.

It is an easy thesis, therefore, that improving television’s quality, diversity, and relevance is a uniquely important target for social progress. Opening up the idiot box and making it competitive is where we need to go next, if we truly care about American free enterprise, social diversity, and democracy. When a society’s openness and diversity grow, the country gets less stable at first, and then much more stable and productive than it was before openness began, as Ian Bremmer notes in The J-Curve (Scribner, 2006).

Paying for the iTV Play

To maximize revenue for the hundreds of thousands of new iTV content creators (individuals, organizations, communities) who are currently shut out of the American living room, there will need to be a mix of payment options, including direct micropayments, personalized commercials, and click-through ads.

Micropayments can be used to purchase video content from a marketplace (like iTunes), or, more commonly, to purchase a subscription from a specialty channel producer, like today’s magazines and newspapers, almost all of which may need iTV channels by the 2020s to survive. Programming on some channels will be monetized by more viewer-friendly versions of today’s commercial breaks, commercials that we can automatically play captioned or at a much lower volume than the regular program, giving us back our conversation space, and a system that allows us to “like,” “dislike,” and permanently block commercials of any type.

Another form of payment, perhaps occurring in a hideable window adjacent to the video, will be context-based per-click revenue and advertising (like Google’s AdSense), a revenue model that is already greatly broadening the availability of text-based content on the Web.

Prospects for iTV

Yochai Benkler’s FCC-commissioned Berkman Center 2009 report, “Next Generation Connectivity,” addresses America’s lagging wired and wireless connectivity and affordability. Other leading developed economies, such as Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and parts of Europe, have many times more broadband (data transfer ability and speed) than the United States has today. The report urges a public–private partnership to make affordable, always-on broadband (1,000 Mbps or more, via fiber optic cable) into a public right. Such “gigabit broadband” is what will allow iTV to emerge in the United States, and the incumbent carriers will provide it as slowly as they can.

Another critical need is net neutrality—that is, the principle that all providers use the information superhighway at the same rates, without discrimination by content type. Some of the above countries, like Japan, have already passed net neutrality laws, while the United States has yet to even consider them in the courts.

I believe that it is the U.S. government’s, not corporations’, role to provide leadership to close the “fiber gap” that currently exists between the United States and leading Asian and European countries, to ensure that the poor have affordable access, and to develop the incentives for bringing broadband (via Wi-Max, LTE, satellite, and other routes) to rural areas. If the U.S. government mandated eminent domain of fiber access routes, and allowed any authorized firms to have access to fiber trunk cabinets, competitive delivery of fiber-to-the-premises (home or office) could be quickly achieved today in all U.S. cities and, a few years later, everywhere.

Americans have had a similar learning experience with the national highways in the early twentieth century, which were once networks of private roads. Road development is ideal to start privately, but once the cost of construction has been recovered plus a reasonable return on investment, private ownership is very inefficient to continue, with all those turnpikes and the constant need to “turn” a profit. U.S. leaders figured this out and nationalized the highway system. Today, the build-operate-transfer model—starting with private construction, a limited operating lease, and then transfer to public ownership—is the fastest-growing and most productive way to create new roads in any country.

I believe the same situation holds for wired and wireless communications channels, our information superhighways. These digital “roads” are great to build out privately, but once the corporations have made a reasonable profit, it’s time to turn those data pipes into a publicly owned utility. Competitive private bidding would keep the public information superhighway maintained and free to all, and many new services and businesses would emerge, with far greater total market value than is possible in today’s limited-connectivity world.

The big telecommunications and cable companies could then be freed to develop even faster and better communications technology, or, failing that, to become content providers. The government could grant them all one last five-year monopoly license before they started this in any state, to give them time to prepare for the rigors of the marketplace. In that setting, Comcast’s recent purchase of NBC would be something we could champion (a move from carrier to content provider).

U.S. leaders may not act to fix the nation’s growing connectivity gap anytime soon, as pundits and lobbyists will do their best to portray this as “inefficient governmental intervention.” Yet, it is exactly such smart intervention that has allowed Asian countries like Japan and South Korea to leapfrog the United States in critical digital-infrastructure development and to develop profitable new businesses and exports around the high-bandwidth Internet, including several early versions of iTV.

Many Americans don’t understand just how anticompetitive the nation’s communications technology laws and regulatory agencies have become, and how much this diminishes the diversity and value of its digital economy. In an iTV world, we can imagine a lot of easily available quality media that would make this case. In the meantime, we do what we can.

About the Author

John M. Smart is a futurist, president of the Acceleration Studies Foundation, and associate professor and Program Champion of the Master of Science in Emerging Technologies at the University of Advancing Technology in Tempe, Arizona. E-mail johnsmart@accelerating.org.

Download the PDF of this article.

Tomorrow in Brief (November-December 2010)

Mosquitoes Beware!

Reducing future mosquito populations may be as simple as simulating the scent of an enemy.

When a pregnant mosquito looks for a safe place to lay her eggs, the scent of a predator will steer her away. If she doesn’t die first, she’ll be forced to lay her eggs in a more densely populated area, where the larvae will have a tougher time competing for survival.

A multidisciplinary team of researchers at the University of Haifa in Israel believe they have identified key compounds released by mosquitoes’ predators. Synthesizing these natural chemicals and releasing them in breeding areas could offer an inexpensive, nontoxic alternative to pesticides.

Source: University of Haifa, www.haifa.ac.il.

The Bus Stops Here: Make Way for AutoTram

A public-transportation vehicle that is as long as a streetcar, agile as a bus, and a whole lot cleaner and more efficient than either is the goal of the AutoTram’s developers.

The trick to making such an electric-powered vehicle work is speeding up the time it takes to recharge the batteries. Since public-transit vehicles are in constant motion (unlike cars parked for many hours at a time), engineers at the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany were challenged to create fast-changing docking stations that would be positioned at stops along the AutoTram’s routes. The batteries must be made large enough to store the energy, and the materials with which the batteries are made must be capable of withstanding these high-speed charges.

In addition, the system needs to be safe, durable, and efficient, thus requiring more challenges for the multidisciplinary research team to conquer before the AutoTram makes its way to tomorrow’s city streets.

Source: Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, www.fraunhofer.de.

Robots to Learn Emotions from Humans

Human emotions are hard enough for people to understand, so robots are especially challenged to interpret, respond to, or simulate the range of human feelings. Robots’ success so far has depended on how well they have been programmed.

In the future, robots may be able to learn human emotions by interacting with people; they’ll form attachments and convey meaning through body language, suggests researcher Lola Cañamero of the University of Hertfordshire, England.

In research funded by the European Commission, Cañamero and colleagues applied a model of children’s early attachment behavior to the programming of robots. The more interaction with (and feedback from) a human caregiver that the robot has, the stronger the bond becomes and the more emotional expression it learns. The goal is to give robots enough emotional intelligence that they could become the caregivers for children in hospitals.

Source: University of Hertfordshire, www.herts.ac.uk.

Smarter Metals for Cooling Systems

A new “thermally elastic” metal alloy has been developed that could improve the efficiency of refrigeration and air-conditioning systems, saving energy and lowering costs.

The smart metal, developed by researchers at the University of Maryland Energy Research Center, is a two-state alloy that alternatively absorbs and creates heat; used in cooling systems, it would take the place of fluid coolants used in compressors and would use far less energy.

“The approach is expected to increase cooling efficiency 175%, reduce U.S. carbon-dioxide emissions by 250 million metric tons per year, and replace liquid refrigerants that can cause environmental degradation in their own right,” according to Center director Eric Wachsman.

Source: University of Maryland, www.umd.edu.

Virtual Autopsies

Advances in medical imaging could reduce the need for invasive autopsies.

A project under way at the University of Leicester in England aims to develop cardiac angiography for use in virtual autopsies. The technology will enable pathologists to diagnose coronary heart disease from CT scans.

“The outcome of this research has the potential to affect every family in the future, and is a significant contribution to the developing practice of using CT scans instead of autopsies,” says project leader Guy Rutty.

Source: University of Leicester, www.le.ac.uk.

Future Scope (November-December 2010)

UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES

Downside of Demand for “Natural” Food

Food manufacturers have reduced the amount of preservatives they use, conceding to consumers’ demand for “natural” foods. But in so doing, they may have increased the risks of food poisoning, warns researcher Nina Wallin Carlquist of Lund University in Sweden.

One of the most common food preservatives is acetic acid, which prevents bacterial growth in sauces, dressings, pickles, and other processed foods. However, when the amount of acetic acid used is too small, it actually “stresses” the existing bacteria into increasing production of toxins.

Carlquist recommends focusing more effort on reducing bacterial contamination of food in the first place, which means better hygiene at all stages of food production and distribution.

“If we know more about what it is in the food that enables the bacteria to thrive, we can then adapt the composition of the food product and thereby improve food safety,” she says. “This is a new way to approach food safety.”

Source: Lund University, www.lu.se.

HEALTH CARE

Fewer Restraints in Nursing Homes

Restraints to protect nursing-home patients may be on the way out in the United States. The use of belts, vests, wrist ties, special chairs, bedside rails, and similar restraints has been cut in half in the past eight years, reports the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), an agency of the federal government.

The trend away from using protective restraints may reflect a growing recognition that they do more harm than good, as they reduce healthful physical activity and increase bedsores, chronic constipation and incontinence, and emotional and other problems, according to AHRQ.

Source: Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, www.ahrq.gov.

CHILD DEVELOPMENT

Payoffs of Good Kindergartens

Doing well in kindergarten can give kids an edge in income as adults, according to new research funded by the (U.S.) National Science Foundation.

As children learn more in their earliest education experience—indicated by moving from average scores on the Stanford Achievement Test up to the 60th percentile or better—their earnings at age 27 are $1,000 more than their counterparts whose scores remain average. And those who benefited from smaller class sizes and more-experienced teachers earned $2,000 more.

Other advantages that a good kindergarten experience bestows include improved likelihood of attending college and of beginning earlier to save for retirement.

Source: National Science Foundation, www.nsf.gov.

TRANSPORTATION

Public Transit Helps Fight Obesity

Urban planning that forces people to walk to a light-rail stop rather than driving their own cars could yield a slimmer, healthier populace, suggests new research from the University of Pennsylvania, Drexel University, and the RAND Corporation.

The study found that construction of a light-rail system increased physical activity and subsequent weight loss by people served by that system. The results suggest that improving neighborhood environments and encouraging the use of light rail could benefit the health of potentially millions of people.

“The built environment can constrain or facilitate physical activity,” says lead investigator John M. MacDonald of the University of Pennsylvania. “Understanding ways to encourage greater use of local environments for physical activity offers some hope for reducing the growth in the prevalence of obesity.”

Source: “The Effect of Light Rail Transit on Body Mass Index and Physical Activity” by John M. MacDonald et al., American Journal of Preventive Medicine, Volume 39, Issue 2 (August 2010), published by Elsevier, www.elsevier.com.

INDICATORS

WordBuzz: Mappiness

The London School of Economics wants to know how happy you are (if you own an iPhone, that is).

Download a free application, and the Mappiness program will beep you a couple of times a day to find out how happy you are, and where you are when you are feeling blissful (or not). The goal is to learn the effects of different environmental conditions (traffic noise, air pollution, pleasant scenery) on relative happiness.

In addition to achieving a little self-awareness on what makes you happy, the site promises participants “the warm glow of helping increase the sum of human knowledge.”

Source: London School of Economics and Political Science, Department of Geography and Environment, www.mappiness.org.uk.

Tweet Patrol

Deploying social networks to solve public safety issues.

A group of researchers in the United Kingdom are using the power of social networks and location broadcasting to make cities safer. The program, Voice Your View, allows pedestrians to record their opinions about their surroundings into a database via their mobile phones or strategically situated kiosks. The data is then shared with both city planners and the public via Web sites and at the public spaces themselves.

Voice Your View bears a slight resemblance to the popular location-based marketing service Foursquare, which rewards users with points and coupons for “checking in” with their phones at various venues and commercial establishments around the city. But the Voice Your View program solicits real-time data from residents and visitors about areas that need improvement.

“A key focus area of the project is people’s perceptions about crime,” says chief investigator Jon Whittle of Lancaster University. He reports that Voice Your View has analysis and artificial intelligence components not available in other commercial services like Twitter and Foursquare. The program surpasses the capabilities of many other social networks. It analyzes the body of data collected at any given point and organizes comments by theme, sentiment, and how easily the problem being reported can be solved. Voice Your View actually connects users to one another and to planners.

“We match up users based on what they are talking about, and we are experimenting with matching users with opposing views so as to break down barriers and start a conversation,” says Whittle.

The research team has conducted public trials in Lancaster, England, with 600 users, and a semi-public trial in the town of Derry. They also have an upcoming trial in Coventry.

Location-based Internet services like this will change city life in the next few decades in a number of ways, according to researchers exploring geographic information system (GIS) solutions. Key barriers remain, such as building out fiber-optic infrastructure to allow for greater system capability, getting citizens who are vulnerable but not technically inclined—like the elderly—to use the systems, and getting policy makers to give importance to the data.

In the near future, systems like Voice Your View could play a central role in larger government management, says Whittle.

“Communities are going to be asked to do more and run their own services,” he says. “Voice Your View and other systems could significantly help facilitate this process. I like what Clay Shirky says when he talks about social networking systems now being so much a part of everyday life that they are taken for granted. It is because they have reached this level of maturity that we are seeing an increasing number of … community initiatives.” — Patrick Tucker

Sources: Voice Your View, www.voiceyourview.com. E-mail interview with Jon Whittle.

In Forecasting, Mini Is Big

A Book Review by David Pearce Snyder

Technology forecaster John Vanston explains why trends that are less than “mega” are very much worth watching.

Minitrends: How Innovators & Entrepreneurs Discover & Profit from Business & Technology Trends by John Vanston, with Carrie Vanston. Technology Futures Inc. 2010. 189 pages. Paperback. $19.95.

Minitrends would have merited an enthusiastic review solely for having introduced a useful new term-of-art for the futurist’s toolbox. But the book offers much more than that. In Minitrends, Technology Futures Inc. chairman John Vanston (writing with TFI’s media and marketing director, Carrie Vanston) has distilled insights and techniques developed over a highly successful 40-year career in technology forecasting into a 189-page do-it-yourself guide to the early identification of those emerging developments that eventually become the “next big things.”

Vanston explicitly offers this guidance for three different levels of users: (1) individuals and group practices, (2) small and medium-sized enterprises, and (3) large firms. This “tracking” of content continues throughout the book, and is, in my experience, a unique (and highly desirable) feature in a book on futures methodology.

The author defines “minitrend” as any trend—technical, social, economic, demographic, legal, etc.—that is just beginning to emerge and that, although not yet acknowledged by the media or the marketplace, has the potential to become nationally significant within two to five years. Eliciting such potentially valuable foresight out of today’s information maelstrom requires considerable self-discipline and commitment, but is an intellectual pursuit well worth the effort.

The book is roughly divided into thirds. The first third describes how minitrends fit into the perceptual frameworks by which futurists view the world and presents a detailed guide to public sources where evidence of minitrends may be gleaned, gauged, and validated.

Vanston’s next three chapters spell out how different types of practitioners can make use of minitrends. Examples of current market-changing developments are offered for each scale of enterprise. Finally, the last four chapters deal with practical steps to take marketplace advantage of minitrends.

While this book is specifically about a futures research methodology, it is also an unabashed business book. The authors’ expressed purpose in writing Minitrends was to enable entrepreneurs at every level of the workplace to take advantage of the foresight that they, themselves, can gather from the “infosphere.”

Throughout the book, Vanston enlivens his narrative with dozens of vignettes from his decades of practice as a tech forecaster. A valuable side benefit of reading Minitrends is discovering the diversity of clientele and assignments that characterizes contemporary applied futuring.

The author reminds us (several times) that the “Minitrend Adventure” is not just a step-wise process; it’s a mind-set that must be maintained at all times, especially now that we are passing through a period of accelerating technical, economic, and demographic change. One minitrend can be trumped by another—or redoubled! The commercial marketplace is complex, volatile, and difficult to anticipate. For this reason, much of the final four chapters of the book deal with selecting specific minitrends for marketplace action, developing an “exploitation scheme,” and putting the scheme into action.

While corporate readers will no doubt be interested in the author’s lucid depiction of the process by which futurists help institutions come to terms with the need for innovation and change, it is the first four chapters that offer the most exciting potential for the future. In those chapters, Minitrends portrays the learnable mind-set of futures research, not on the basis of visionary principles or rigid rules, but in attitudes, in habits of thinking about the world, and in the collective events of daily life that make up the forecastable continuities of human enterprise.

The patterns of thought that Vanston describes, the modalities by which emerging trends manifest themselves, and where to find corroborative information are discussed in such straightforward, jargon-free language that anyone with a college degree could use the first four chapters of Minitrends as a primer for teaching himself or herself to become a competent trend spotter: i.e., applied futurist.

Because the early identification of emergent long-term trends poses such enormous marketplace value, it seems not improbable that traffic in minitrends will become a significant online phenomenon during the next two to five years. I am also prepared to believe that much of that traffic will be generated by freelance futurists who learned their trade by reading this book.

About the Reviewer

David Pearce Snyder is principal of The Snyder Family Enterprise, 8628 Garfield Street, Bethesda, Maryland 20817. Web site www.the-futurist.com. He is also THE FUTURIST magazine’s contributing editor for lifestyles.

Reviewer’s disclosure: I have known John Vanston since 1973, and during the first 15 years of our respective careers, we collaborated on projects for a number of clients. He asked me to assess a pre-publication copy of Minitrends and to provide an “endorsement” to put on the flyleaf of the book. While critiquing the work of a friend and colleague is fraught with awkward possibilities, my review rests entirely on the merits of the book. —DPS

Foresight Across National Borders

A Book Review by Rick Docksai

Experts seek global answers for global problems.

2010 State of the Future by Jerome C. Glenn, Theodore J. Gordon, and Elizabeth Florescu. The Millennium Project. 2010. 88 pages, paperback, with 7,000 pages on CD‑ROM. $49.95.

Human society could grow vastly healthier, more peaceful, and more prosperous later this century, or it could be devastated by ecological damage and domestic strife, according to the 2010 State of the Future, by Jerome Glenn, Theodore Gordon, and Elizabeth Florescu, scholars of the futures-studies think tank Millennium Project. The report calls for decision makers to become more collaborative and responsive to change.

“The world has the resources to address its challenges. What is not clear is whether the world will make good decisions on the scale necessary to really address the global challenges,” says the report.

Like the other annual State of the Future reports that preceded it, this year’s edition combines input from experts across the globe to measure the world’s progress on benchmarks of human health, political freedom, safety, conflict resolution, education, and environmental welfare.

On the plus side, the 2010 report notes clear signs of recovery in most economies from the 2008 recession. In addition, the explosive growth of the Internet and mobile-phone-based Web technology is a boon for intercontinental communication and cultural exchange.

Many other quality-of-life factors are trending positive: Poverty rates are falling in most parts of the world; wars are fewer in number; and literacy rates, women’s representation in government legislatures, and life expectancies are all on the rise.

The report cites other trends that are cause for alarm, however. For example, climate change is occurring more rapidly and more dramatically than anticipated. Also, as the information economy grows, so do the volumes of electronic waste discarded into the environment. Moreover, communities on every continent suffer unacceptably high rates of organized crime activity, violent crime, and violence against women.

Fostering the positive trends while minimizing or reversing the harmful ones will require “trans-institutional decision-making” processes that bring together as much expert opinion as possible in minimal time, according to the report. Global, national, and local systems must work together to anticipate disruption and navigate challenges.

“There are many answers to many problems, but we are flooded with so much extraneous information every day that it is difficult to identify and concentrate on what is truly relevant,” says the report.

Technology may be a valuable bridge. The report describes South Korea’s Climate Change Situation Room, which receives insights and research data from climatologists worldwide into a central information system. Situation Room staff researchers analyze the entered data, tag it, annotate it, and link it. The end result is a synthesis of expert advice on best responses to the changing climate.

The Early Warning System with SOFI Capability, in use by the prime minister of Kuwait, is another promising system. It uses the Millennium Project’s own Real-Time Delphi software to continuously survey experts inside Kuwait and across the globe on the variables that they deem most critical to ensuring a better future for Kuwait.

The Real-Time Delphi program even combines all the factors to calculate an overall score for Kuwait’s future prospects. This score allows the prime minister to gauge how making changes to one variable might affect other variables and sway the overall score.

“These are systems that facilitate the interaction and feedback among human judgments, information, and software so that each can change in real time,” says the report in reference to the South Korean and Kuwaiti systems.

The report further details the Millennium Project’s own compilations of global research in a survey of the futures-research activities of the Millennium Project’s nodes. It also has several new studies not seen in the 2009 edition. These include a series of developments likely to significantly impact Latin America before 2030. Also, the report contains an international review of the concept of creating a Partnership for Sustainable Development.

The 2010 State of the Future presents descriptions of both formidable challenges and exciting new technology-enhanced foresight systems that could help world leaders meet them. The report makes a compelling case for international cooperation and then displays fascinating, successful test cases in how such cooperation can work. World leaders, policy makers, and private citizens of all walks of life would find the report both impressive and enlightening.

Books in Brief (November-December 2010)

A Field Guide to Outer Space

The Farthest Shore: A 21st Century Guide to Space edited by Joseph N. Pelton and Angelia P. Bukley. Apogee Books. 2010. 416 pages. Paperback. $27.95.

The Farthest Shore optimistically considers the opportunities and advantages that outer space may hold for us in the future.

Taking their cue from the International Space University’s “3-I” approach (interdisciplinary, intercultural, and international), the editors have compiled essays by a number of experts in different fields from around the world, covering everything from space tourism to astrobiology to existing and emerging satellite technologies, and much in between. The volume also includes an overview of representations of space travel in art, literature, and cinema and an examination of the ways that outer space can potentially help fight climate change.

Written with a general audience in mind, The Farthest Shore is straightforward, informative, in-depth, and accessible.

How Open Collaboration Is Creating a “World Brain”

Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia by Joseph Michael Reagle Jr. The MIT Press. 2010. 256 pages. $27.95.

In Good Faith Collaboration, media scholar Joseph Reagle takes an ethnographic approach to understanding the collaborative “open content” community behind Wikipedia.

Wikipedia’s pseudonymous and anonymous contributions are fundamentally assumed to be made in good faith, and the site is governed largely via pro-social norms, consensus building, and—most significantly—three core content policies: neutral point of view, no original research, and verifiability. The author examines these elements in depth while looking at the ways that leadership functions in this community and how anything other than consensus decision making could potentially compromise Wikipedia’s openness.

Reagle also considers the online encyclopedia’s origins (which date back to H. G. Wells’s concept of a “world brain” and, more recently, to the free and open-source software movements) and its future potential in this compelling look at Wikipedia and wiki culture.

Why the Recession Is a Great Opportunity

The Great Reset: How New Ways of Living and Working Drive Post-Crash Prosperity by Richard Florida. HarperCollins. 2010. 225 pages. Paperback. $26.99.

The economic recession is really an economic “reset,” argues economist Richard Florida. We are seeing the demise of obsolete means of production and consumption and their replacement with new alternatives.

Florida notes that several economic crashes took place in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and each one was followed by a period of sweeping innovation. In the same vein, the current global crisis could be resolved as individuals and societies transition away from outmoded and obsolete methods of commerce and consumption.

Florida analyzes the trends under way and projects a new way of life that is emerging from them. He expects the industrial economy to transition to an economy driven by ideas, creativity, and knowledge, and the financial sector to lose prominence as more investment goes toward education, health care, technology, and human capital.

The Great Reset retraces history while also projecting a hopeful course for the world’s future. Economists, historians, and futurists may all find it interesting reading.

Local TV in a Globalized World

New Flows in Global TV by Albert Moran. The University of Chicago Press. 2009. 192 pages. Paperback. $40.

This critical examination of the global television industry focuses on the ways that television programs are distributed internationally—and the ways that business and culture intersect in the international marketplace of TV programs.

Viewers’ tastes and preferences tend to be specific to their localities. Traditionally, syndicated “canned” programs have been translated and re-dubbed for broadcast in other languages and cultures, but an alternative approach—program formats—allows for more successful linguistic and cultural integration into other markets. Program formats are licensed as a set of instructions and services that enable a customized version of the program to be produced elsewhere. An example is Britain’s Pop Idol franchise, which has been replicated around the world.

Author Albert Moran, a senior lecturer in media at Australia’s Griffith University, examines how and why everything from children’s programs such as Romper Room to reality and game shows are being reformatted for diverse global audiences.

Future View: Cultural Stickiness in Technological Forecasting

By Samuel Gerald Collins

Why forecasters relying on linear projections sometimes get “stuck.”

Technology-oriented futurists have been fairly successful in their predictions of technological change and development; cultural trend watchers have likewise succeeded in anticipating many social changes. But the impacts of technology on culture—and of culture on technology—have been less predictable. One reason is the relative “stickiness” of cultures. The adage that “the more things change, the more they stay the same” bears remembering.

Case in point: It’s 1950, and Levitt and Sons are adding new models to their New York suburb. What makes these new ranchers different from the first homes in Levittown is the television: an Admiral set built directly in the wall of the living room. But why built in? Didn’t the designers realize that someone would make improvements to the television? What if the new sets were larger?

The 1950 design implied several other predictions. First, the built-in set assumes that television would be a group activity. The whole family would automatically want their television in the living room, and the TV would be heir to the parlor-room entertainments of the Victorian era. Second, the 1950 design assumes that the television would work to bring everyone together in a nucleated way—Mom in the kitchen, Dad on the easy chair, children sitting beneath him on the carpet.

Of course, in this age of individuated media consumption, the television in the living room seems like a curious artifact of the past. But could Levitt and Sons have foreseen the family all retiring to their bedrooms to watch movies by themselves—or even taking their entertainment out of the house with them on their own mobile devices? Couldn’t they have foreseen patterns of television viewing based on more solitary pursuits, such as reading and letter writing?

Every new technology brings with it cultural surprises, including unexpected uses that were never predicted. But that’s not a bad thing. On the contrary, it’s the surprises that provide the creative impulse for new ideas, and one area worth examining is exactly that shadowy zone where cultural ideas and practices come together to form new technocultures.

But where would we look for some emerging technoculture?

Writing in the last half of the nineteenth century, anthropologist E. B. Tylor felt he had a duty to identify what he considered to be superannuated elements of culture and mark them for extinction. Examples of his “theory of survivals” included both the relatively innocuous (e.g., sewn cuffs as a survival of times when shirt sleeves were actually folded back), and the profound (Tylor held particular contempt for the occult, which he believed had no place in science). In his mind, cultural survivals introduced two areas of intolerable confusion into the society of the nineteenth century. First, cultural traits that should be “extinct” still existed. And second, cultural survivals had “shifted,” moved from their original contexts into new ones.

It’s been 150 years, but we still think a lot like E. B. Tylor. The future is presumed to result from a linear course of development: e.g., the Web gives way to Web 2.0 (and so on). That the reality is a good deal messier may be a source of consternation to latter-day Tylors. But what if we looked at cultural survivals not as a problem to be cleaned up, but as a potential for change?

From this perspective, we could say that culture is inherently “sticky,” and by that I mean both its meaning in economics (when, for instance, some consumer prices refuse to follow other indices) and in Web design, where “sticky” pages keep people coming back and staying longer. Culture can be “sticky” in all those ways—as something that may inexplicably adhere, and also as something that we connect back to even as we engage with new cultural experiences.

The problem for Levitt and Sons was that the television they envisioned projected a linear progression of technologies of the parlor and public—from cinemas to radios to the built-in TV. Their progression from public to private stopped at the family unit, and did not extend to the individual. The source of stickiness that remains is the cultural desire for a connection to the outside world—instant news and entertainment—that the television offered.

What kinds of “built-in televisions” are we installing today? That is, what assumptions are we making about the way that we will live with the things we invent? If we conflate the development of these technologies with current lifestyles, we are likely to be surprised when novel practices emerge, bubbling out of the past to confound our best predictions.

The futurist’s role in the study of culture should be to look for these potential areas of alternative “stickiness”—the ways in which our cultural life mixes technologies, beliefs, and practices together, in a process that produces not just “survivals” ripe for the chopping block, but resources for richer cultural experiences.

Thinking about our technocultural futures may not lead to accurate predictions, but the exercise itself may bring to light surprising connections from the past, present, and future in such a way that invigorates our imagining of what might be by unsettling some of our linear assumptions of what has to be.

About the Author

Samuel Gerald Collins is a cultural anthropologist at Towson University, who has researched, published, and taught on cultural futures for the last 16 years. His most recent book is Library of Walls: Contradictions of Information Society at the Library of Congress (2009). E-mail scollins@towson.edu.

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