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I agree with Bruce Michael Conforth here:
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The sociologist Robert Jay Lifton has written about the “Protean Man” who is more comfortable with images than with words and with fragmentation than with wholes. This, of course, is nothing more than the fruition of McLuhan’s “the medium is the message.” It is our mediums that have become the driving forces in our culture and society, not the ideas they transmit. The Internet is reshaping not just the way we communicate but reprogramming our neurological makeup in ways we can’t even yet imagine. We want, indeed NEED, tiny instantaneous fragments of information: sound bytes, word bytes, info bytes, image bites… the instantaneously and ever changing visual imagery ushered in by things like MTV, computer screens, split screens, virtual reality, etc. And the speed by which things appear, go viral, and then are gone almost precludes the possibility of there being a subculture that lasts anywhere nearly as long as ones in the past have.

And do you know what made the Beats, Hippies, and Punks possible more than anything else? There were no distractions. There were three television networks, no cable or satellite. There were only a few radio stations, and they still featured live, local djs. There were no video games, nothing digital, no iPods or mp3 players… there weren’t even cassette players for most of those times. There were no VHS tapes or DVDs or CDs… you wanted to see a movie you had to go to the theater. No Internet of course. No computers of any kind. There were no ATMs or credit cards… no cell phones… there weren’t even xerox machines until the 1970s. The only things we had were each other. The only things we could do was hang out together, talk, have sex, do drugs, and make our own music and art. Yes, there were all the cultural influences I mentioned earlier but the only way to share them all was face to face real human interaction.
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flavorwire hipsters trends futurismo

As an art history major (all the way to PhD), I approve of this message... Virginia Postrel nails it:
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The skills that still matter are the habits of mind I honed in the classroom: how to analyze texts carefully, how to craft and evaluate arguments, and how to apply microeconomic reasoning, along with basic literacy in accounting and statistics. My biggest regret isn’t that I didn’t learn Fortran, but that I didn’t study Dante.
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virginia_postrel arthistory economy college trends bloomberg

Intro, after which the author summarizes 7 trends relating to collaboration:
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Since the dawn of managerial capitalism, collaboration and work have almost always been synonymous. People need other people to realize their greatest impact, and innovation, perhaps the most valuable activity in business, depends critically on the kind of cross-pollination of ideas that collaboration enables.
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1.Consumerize everything.
2. It's all about the culture.
3. Cherish your experts, not your documents.
4. Build the 24-hour knowledge factory.
5. Mandate structure within the social cacophony.
6. Tap the wisdom of your crowd, and any crowd.
7. Keep it real.

mit_techreview trends collaboration

Interesting, especially in light of sustainablecities article about obesity rates being on the rise in *cities* (and finding no linkage to economics)...
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The study compared ‘market-liberal’ countries (United States, Britain, Canada and Australia) with seven relatively affluent European countries that have systems that traditionally offer stronger social protection (Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Norway, Spain and Sweden). It concludes that economic security plays a significant role in determining levels of obesity. Countries with higher levels of job and income security were associated with lower levels of obesity.
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obesity economics economic_development trends

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As urbanization occurs alongside these rising obesity rates, this presents an opportunity to change people’s behaviors through sustainable urban design, active transport, and policies that encourage physical activity and other healthy ways to live in cities.
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obesity urbanization cities trends

One of the best, most thought-provoking articles on education I've read in a long time, by Maria H. Andersen. Brilliant, brilliant insights and suggestions...

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Mass education is adequate, as long as students are highly motivated to learn and get ahead of their peers. In developing countries, a student who is successful in education will be able to climb the ladder of personal economic prosperity faster than those who are not successful. But in industrialized countries, where prosperity is the norm, an education does not necessarily translate into a significantly higher standard of living. In these countries, there is no longer a large economic incentive to learn, so the motivation to learn must become intrinsic. As we redesign en masse education, we must address learners’ intrinsic motivations, which means that education must circle back to being personal again.
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maria_h_andersen education trends futurismo innovation disruption socialtheory socratic socrait

Bruce Schneier continues to deliver the goods when it comes to smart analysis. His end-of-2010 predictions for 2020 are no exception. Example:

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We’re not Google’s customers; we’re Google’s product that they sell to their customers. It’s a three-way relation­ship: us, the IT service provider, and the advertiser or data buyer. And as these noncustomer IT relationships proliferate, we'll see more IT companies treating us as products. If I buy a Dell computer, then I'm obviously a Dell customer; but if I get a Dell computer for free in exchange for access to my life, it’s much less obvious whom I’m entering a business relationship with. Facebook’s continual ratcheting down of user privacy in order to satisfy its actual customers­—the advertisers—and enhance its revenue is just a hint of what’s to come.
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and
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One old trend: deperimeterization. Two current trends: consumerization and decentralization. Three future trends: deconcentration, decustomerization, and depersonization. That’s IT in 2020—­it’s not under your control, it’s doing things without your knowledge and consent, and it’s not necessarily acting in your best interests. And this is how things will be when they’re working as they’re intended to work; I haven't even started talking about the bad guys yet.

That’s because IT security in 2020 will be less about protecting you from traditional bad guys, and more about protecting corporate business models from you.
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Such a brave new world...

bruce_schneier trends security 2020 customers customer_relations

Interesting list... The ten in brief (click through for full description/ discussion): 1) Economic Turmoil; 2) Green Power; 3) The Senior Market; 4) Discount Retail; 5) Local Business; 6) Education; 7) Parental Outsourcing; 8) Health and Wellness; 9) Texas [huh? Texaplex cities: Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth, San Antonio, Austin: Youth Magnet cities]; 10) Affordable Alcohol; and 10 1/2) Pets.

trends trendwatch economy entrepreneur_magazine

Want to look at this later. Interesting tension (imo) between being chosen to be profiled like this, vs just doing it (as 1000s of other "creatives" are). There are a number of people here (as anywhere) who would fit the bill to be profiled, but they don't live in London, so they're not. Now, does that mean you have to live in London (or: insert fave big / creative city)?, or can you be whiz-bang successful creative and live beyond the pale? Where is the pale these days? What,for that matter, is a pale, in the age of the internets?

creatives trends questions

Jemima Kiss writes about the recent Pew report that describes how "well-educated, technically-savvy young web users are shaping the media habits of the US, with one in 20 Americans saying they do not watch TV on a typical day and a sharp decline in newspaper readership, according to new research."

Interesting findings on education levels and TV-watching *and* interest (lack thereof) in science and technology, too.

newspapers television media news the_guardian jemima_kiss reference aggregators pew trends

PSFK's round-up of trends (recent, 2008). Top of the heap in the list: lists, aka data (how to sort, how to represent, how to use); next, urbanism (varieties).

psfk trends 2008

"The world is flat" or "the world is spiky" or ..."the world is complex," maybe? At any rate, this article questions the idea that outsourcing will continue to continue, spreading outward in some sort of new and flattened topography (akin to a downward spiral insofar as the search for ever cheaper labor and laxer labor laws continues, but not wholly downward because economically, there's an upward trend associated with it, too - hence perhaps the "flat" topography). And it presents some interesting data as well as suppposition for why this might be so. It's not just the huge up-tick in transportation costs (although that's a key factor), it's also the logistics -- including "reverse logistics." For example, consumers *want* to do better, and are becoming more aware of the "carbon footprint" of the products they buy.

globalization trends economic_development manufacturing transportation factories shipping

Interesting article (which incidentally puts Vancouver front & centre), blogged by Richard Florida at Creative Class: the subtitle is "the demographic inversion of the American city." It's about how the "inner city" and its "inner city suburbs" are now desirable (and expensive) places to live, creating a 24/7 downtown (desired & theorized early on by Jane Jacobs, eg.), while the less affluent (ok, the poor!) are forced to live on the outskirts (suburbs). This used to be called "gentrification," but Ehrenhalt points out that it's a much more complex process than just that.

Haven't read all the comments to this article, but it starts with some excellent ones -- intelligent observations by readers.

cities downtown creative_cities suburbs gentrification trends urbanization urban_renewal demographics

Informative review of Bill Bishop's new book, The Big Sort. It's intriguing to juxtapose this to the Knute Berger article that discusses transumerism, which I also bookmarked today. It's almost as if two things are at work here: on the one hand, people "sorting" themselves demographically, and on the other, people circulating (and becoming a site of circulation), just like capital. The new physics of social data sets, with the transumers being a special case of relative sorting? :)

Also of course fascinating in Stossel's review/ Bishop's book are the observations on "the big sort"'s effect on politics, and that homogenous communities tend to be more cantakerous because they're so bloody convinced that they have it right, whereas heterogenous communities are forced into conversations with people of opposing views, which in turn informs all parties and makes "solutions" less "obvious," but also makes people more willing to compromise and/or put their shoulder to the wheel to keep things rolling in the right direction.

I personally believe that my hometown (Victoria BC) would benefit if more people here had more awareness of all the different things -- vocations, careers, lifestyles, EVERYTHING -- going on, instead of thinking that everyone else surely *must* think just as they do. You see this again and again when the question of urban development comes up: the same tired gang with the same tired cliches runs to the forefront, claims to represent the majority (which in a sense they do, as the majority is just as ignorant as the vocal gang), and bemoans all change coming to the city because they believe it "hurts" what they see as the primary economic engine here (tourism). They're totally unaware, it seems, that the high tech industry overtook tourism several years ago in terms of how much revenue it generates (something like $1.2b for tourism, and nearly $2b for high tech in Greater Victoria). This clinging to homogeneity (which is an illusion here: see the tech and the arts and the "different" communities

big_sort demographics democracy trends bill_bishop

An article by Eric Savitz that sums up the panel presentation by Steve Jurvetson, Vinod Khosla, Josh Kopelman, Roger McNamee, Joe Schoendorf, and Tony Perkins on the top 10 tech trends to be aware of. Lots of buzz around mobile phone technology, mobile computing in the manner of what The Economist called "Nomads at last" (see http://tinyurl.com/643een) "who are defined not by what they carry but by what they leave behind, knowing that the environment will provide it."

Speaking of modeling the new urban connected classes on nomads (and Bedouins), another trend identified by the panel was that water is the next peak oil. See Wired Magazine, Peak Water (http://tinyurl.com/5kzqcv).

Jurvetson talked about how "evolution trumps design," which seemed to me like he is channeling Janine Benyus and Lynn Margulis. Microbes are drivers of evolutionary biomass viability on Planet Gaia; we're part of that game; and we will figure out how to engineer matter at the nano level of microbial life to "hack" evolution's code and make those organisms work for us. Dangerous, but inevitable. (As Margulis and Dorian Sagan point out, however, if Gaia is a living thing and if living things are defined by having the ability to reproduce, then our role on earth may well be to help Gaia reproduce: i.e., create viable biospheres that can be sent away from Earth into space. What better place to fulfil that mandate than to tinker with microbes and evolution?)

trends technology futurismo

Available as a 15-page printable PDF, too, this is the website version. From the intro:
"FREE LOVE: the ongoing rise of free, valuable stuff that's available to consumers online and offline. From AirAsia tickets to Wikipedia, and from diapers to music.
FREE LOVE thrives on an all-out war for consumers' ever-scarcer attention and the resulting new business models and marketing techniques, but also benefits from the ever-decreasing costs of producing physical goods, the post-scarcity dynamics of the online world (and the related avalanche of free content created by attention-hungry members of GENERATION C), the many C2C marketplaces enabling consumers to swap instead of spend, and an emerging recycling culture.
Expect FREE LOVE to become an integral if not essential part of doing business."

free marketing trends trendwatch

I read something about this study last week, can't recall where, and generally think it's a bit silly anyway. But what catches my attention in this Toronto Star article by Peter Goddard is how it brings out that visual art is currently at the very bottom of the totem pole. I see that in my own habits, too, and wonder why it's so. Is it because too much of the art being produced is uninteresting?, can't compete with other media or arts (like theatre, music, etc.)? Has visual art become somehow irrelevant, and if so, when did this happen and why? Does it have to do with time, with speed? Or simply relevance -- and format?

arts cultural_support culture popular_opinion socialtheory studies surveys trends

- interesting article about a young architect who talks the talk and walks the walk: she works on highrises and downtown buildings, and lives d/t in a highrise with her young daughters and husband (families *can* live in condos d/t).

architect christopher_hume profile sybil_wa trends

- article published in May 2007; "After this year the majority of people will live in cities. Human history will ever more emphatically become urban history, says John Grimond." Rural contribution to human progress has been slight compared to urban contributions.

cities john_grimond megacities the_economist trends urbanization