Social trends – Page 21

The top 10 trends for the 2010s: the most exciting decade in human history

In his excellent book The Meaning of the 21st Century, James Martin asks when in human history you would most like to be alive.

For me there is no question that it is now. The coming decade will be the most exciting in human history. The very challenging year of 2009 that we are preparing to bid farewell to helped to tear up the fairly linear progress of the first decade of the century. Now, technological and social change are poised to accelerate far beyond what we have become accustomed to.

A critical uncertainty is how well we will respond to this extraordinary pace of change, both as individuals and as societies. Will we be able to adapt and change, or will severe dysfunctions emerge? Just one dimension is the manifold ethical dilemmas that are raised by gaining extraordinary technological capabilities.

Here are the ten trends that I believe will be most fundamental to the decade ahead. I hope to present these and associated trends in an interactive visual format before long. For now, here are the 10 trends for 2010.

1. Information Intensity

We will soon consume more media than there are waking hours, by virtue of multi-channeling at most times. Billions of people and places will be media producers, including video streaming from most points of view on the world. We are just at the dawn of an incomprehensible daily onslaught of news and information – some valuable, much useless.

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The 10 TENsions That Will Define 2010

By Ross Dawson

To anticipate what will shape 2010, we need to understand the TENsions that will define the opening year of the TENsions decade. The TENsions that are most prominent will evolve during the course of the decade. However the accelerating pace of change means that TENsions will inevitably define the decade, in myriad forms.

These are the 10 TENsions for 2010, the opening year of the TENsions.

1. Optimism – Fear

Many companies and workers are now daring to be optimistic as they put 2009 behind them, look forward to opportunities, and worry about getting left behind if things improve rapidly. Yet with the shock of the onset of the financial crisis still fresh, any optimism is subject to being shattered, resulting in wild swings in confidence.

2. Institutional work – Independent work

While many lost their jobs in 2009, sparking a rise in home-based work such as direct selling, many others gave up self-employment to return to the workforce. Over the long term more people are making the shift to work independently, by desire or necessity. However the temptations of self-employment can be replaced by desire for a steady pay packet, pulling people both ways.

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Newshour: the state of Facebook and social networks

By Ross Dawson

Australia Network’s Newshour program recently ran a segment looking at online social networks, in particular Facebook.

The program features a number of excerpts from an interview with me about the online social network industry.

Here is a brief summary of the key points made in the interview:

* How Facebook has been used to promote Sydney as a tourist destination, resulting in a 276% increase in working holiday visas applications for Americans

* The popularity of social networks was foreseeable (and foreseen), fulfilling a human desire to connect

* Obama’s election campaign redefined both political fundraising and how social networks are perceived

* In building profitable social networks, there are limits to the advertising model however a range of new models are being explored

Leadership event: How fast will Australia’s population grow? Examining the uncertainties in demographic forecasts

By Ross Dawson

This morning I gave the opening keynote at an internal leadership conference of a major Australian retailer, addressing the topic of Embracing the Future.

One of the key issues for the long-term planning of any large organization is the basic demography of the country. While I spent much of my presentation looking at social change, I started by looking at the state of population forecasts for Australia.

A few months ago Australia’s Treasury department foreshadowed the release of the third Intergenerational Report, which examines the impact of population change and aging. The second report, released in 2007, forecast an Australian population of 28.5 million in 2050, however two scant years later the forecast has been revised to 35 million. This would make Australia the fastest-growing developed country in the world.

Let’s look at some of the figures and uncertainties behind these forecasts. While we often hear that “Demographics is Destiny”, in fact demographic forecasts are fraught with uncertainty.

This first image shows the earlier three population scenarios for this century from the government.

THREE POPULATION SCENARIOS FOR AUSTRALIA

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The next big market after ringtones: Download a new car engine sound

By Ross Dawson

The inimitable Richard Watson has come up with what just might be a big (and unanticipated) market: car engine sound downloads.

Richard’s fantastic Nowandnext.com bulletins are now openly available after long being a subscription-only service, used by many of the leading creative agencies around the world. To read the latest issue, go to Nowandnext.com and click on the Orange “Current Issue” button at the top left to read the latest bulletin.

What just caught my attention was his article ‘Why we don’t want a quiet drive’ in the Automotive and Transport section, reproduced below.

Certainly electric car engineers have long been aware that cars being too quiet is a significant safety issue. And yes, absolutely, car sounds are personal statements. The sound of a Alfa Sprint (which I greatly enjoyed driving when I owned one) or a Bugatti motorcycle, for example, are unmistakeable.

When you start to need to make a car noisier than it is mechanically, the range of driving sounds will become infinite. You will be able to choose from the sound of any vintage car you wish, or use an entirely new sound, including those of various types of UFOs, choo-choo trains, or chanting monks.

Of course this market is a little way from taking off big time. And it’s possible that there will be regulation on what are acceptable car sounds. However in that case there should also be regulation on acceptable mobile phone ringtones, something almost everyone would agree on :-).

Why we don’t want a quiet drive

For anyone who was looking forward to the pleasant, gentle hum of electric/hybrid cars in place of the throaty roar of internal combustion engines, here is some bad news. The future is something called “synthesised engine noises”. Believe it or not, people want cars to sound like cars and – worse still – quiet cars have been found to be unsafe. Nobody hears them coming.

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ABC TV interview: The future of direct selling

By Ross Dawson

In March I gave the opening keynote at the Direct Selling Association’s conference, talking about the breadth of opportunities in the economy and the role online social networks and communication might play in the future of the industry. From what I learned by preparing for and giving the keynote, I wrote a brief piece Six Key Insights into the future of the Direct Selling Industry.

Last week ABC TV did a short segment looking at the success of the direct selling industry during the downturn, and where it is likely to go from here, shown below. An excerpt from an interview with me was included in the program. During the interview I discussed the perception challenges of the industry, the role of generational change, and the use of social technologies in direct selling.

While it wasn’t included in the final TV segment, in the interview I discussed the emergence of ‘social commerce’ as the likely center of much economic activity, and the potential for elements of the direct selling industry as we know it to morph into creating real in that space. The opportunity is there, however we have yet to see whether the industry will take it.

Five reasons why Turkey is one of the hottest Internet markets in the world

By Ross Dawson

Last week I gave the opening keynote at IPZ2009 Interactive Marketing Summit in Istanbul. Here are my slides for my keynote on the Future of Interactive Marketing.

It was a fantastic event, the fourth annual IPZ conference organized by Günseli Özen Ocako?lu and Hakan Senbir of Marketing & Management Institute, which publishes a range of leading magazines including Marketing Türkiye.

In preparing for my keynote and during my visit I discovered many fascinating things I did not know about the Turkish online market. It is in fact one of the hottest and fastest-growing Internet markets in the world.

As it happens I have a very deep interest in language-defined online markets, such as Japanese, Chinese, French, Portuguese, Italian, and Korean. Each of these markets – some within national borders and others spanning countries – has very different characteristics across all facets including which types of social media are used, which are dominant players, and the most successful business models. I have written about this before in the context of blogging languages and global media strategies, and will be doing further analysis of country markets soon.

Here are five facts that illustrate how exciting the Turkish online market is.

1. Turkey is the third largest country in the world on Facebook

Source: CheckFacebook

Coming from almost nothing two years ago, Turkey now has close to 14 million Facebook users, overtaking France and Canada earlier this year to be the third largest country on Facebook after the US and UK. Facebook does not dominate social networking in other high population countries such as Brazil, Russia and Japan, so Turkey with a population of 72 million and a very rapid uptake of online services ranks close to the top of the list.

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Augmented reality and ID tagging might be the killer apps for video glasses

By Ross Dawson

Since 2006 I have owned and written about video glasses, including in my Six Trends that are transforming Online and Future of Media Lifecycle framework.

Despite my predictions, we still don’t see many people around wearing video glasses. However I still think it’s going to happen, as I predicted earlier this week.

In the many radio interviews I’ve done this week I was asked a lot about the video glasses. As I explained, there are many applications for video glasses, but augmented reality is the most powerful.

The recent swathe of augmented reality apps on iPhone have shown us the very beginning of the potential of AR. However people don’t want to be always holding up their phone in front of their face.

A case in point is ID tagging, in which facial recognition software identifies people in your field of vision and provides additional information about them. This is something far more easily and less obviously done using video glasses.

The classic scenario is that you see someone you’ve met before and don’t remember their name, but your AR glasses displays their name and any other publicly available information or things that you’ve noted previously next to them.

Imagine when the technologies in this video can be embedded into your glasses. This kind of information could easily get people to start wearing glasses when they go out into social situations.

Futurist proved correct! …and today describes the extraordinary social technologies of 2016 (release)

By Ross Dawson

This morning Future Exploration Network issued this press release (excuse the hyperbole :-) ) I have already done several radio interviews on the forecasts in the release with quite a few more radio, newspaper and TV interviews lined up for the next days – the ideas seem to have struck a chord.

Futurist proved correct! …and today describes the extraordinary social technologies of 2016

Seven years ago, in his prescient book Living Networks, global leading futurist Ross Dawson accurately described the networked world of today, anticipating social networks, Twitter, corporate blogging, crowd-sourcing, personalised advertising, virtual personal assistants and much else that is now familiar to us.

Today, he offers insights into the extraordinary world of technology we will experience seven years into the future.

Ross’s forecasts for 2016 include:

• Many people will wear video glasses as they commute and walk around, experiencing new forms of television, news updates, and detailed information about the world around them and people they meet.

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