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.

Download the PDF of this article.