Recently in Social trends Category

I recently finished reading the techno-thriller Daemon by Daniel Suarez. It is certainly not literature, but it is a fast-paced thriller that I found hard to put down. It posits a world in which a genius who creates online games builds a systems that makes the entire world into what is effectively a game, with an augmented reality interface, and in which individuals earn points for tasks that give them higher ranking.

I have long thought it is inevitable that much of our work and play will take place in what are effectively game environments.

In Jesse Schell's presentation at DICE (hattip: Kevin Kelly/The Technium) he gives an array of fantastic ideas about the intersection of reality and gaming. After covering how many games such as Wii, Guitar Hero and Webkinz are bring the real world into games, he goes off (from around 18:00) on a rapid-fire string of suggestions about how every aspect of the world can be made into a game.

It is intriguing that mobile social networking, which I have written about since its early days in 2002, has only taken off when Foursquare made it into a game. As people become more familiar with gaming environments and concepts, it seems natural to bring in gaming aspects to more parts of our life. Dangerous things that way lie, but it is inevitable that games and what we think of as reality will be merged to an extraordinary degree.

[UPDATE:] Tom Foremski says why he thinks this is a scary future.

I am not that keen on the word "crowdsourcing", because people mean many different things when they use the term. However since it is the word most used to describe tapping the power of distributed talent, which is one of the most important emerging themes in our hyper-connected world, I will embrace it, and hopefully soon draw up my own taxonomy of what crowdsourcing means to help clarify the conversation.

I was struck by a post by Steve Kelman on The dark side of crowdsourcing?. Kelman attended a presentation by Jonathan Zittrain (esteemed scholar and author of The Future of the Internet - and How to Stop It) in which Zittrain pointed to how crowdsourcing approaches could used for bad things. However Kelman came out primarily impressed with the vast potential of the field.

One of the best-known domains for crowdsourcing is getting contributions for inventors and innovators to contribute, using innovation markets such as Innocentive (which I described in Chapter 5 of Living Network on Innovation), and prizes such as the X-Prize Foundation.

An emerging domain is using large pools of people to monitor for crime:

Zittran then noted the growth of applications (this one from the U.K.) where people, for very small amounts of money, are apparently willing, from the comfort of their couches, to monitor crime surveillance cameras to look for suspicious activity and report it. Some companies are also getting people, again for micro-payments, to report in if they recognize photos of people participating in a mass marijuana smoke-in.

The downsides of these kinds of applications were then raised:

Last week the ABC's 7:30 Report spent the entire week looking at the drivers of Australia’s long-term future. The fourth program, on The social impact of the population boom, was an excellent examination of the diverse issues and perspectives on the implications of rapid population growth, including interviews with a diverse range of politicians, demographers, analysts, and myself as the lone futurist.

It’s well worth seeing the video of the full program along with the transcript on the ABC's website. A video of the program’s introduction and excerpts from my comments are below.

The program examined Australia’s demographic and social future, however the issues raised are absolutely relevant in all developed countries, where low immigration inevitably means a rapidly aging population, with all of the associated challenges.

Last December I wrote about the driving trends and uncertainties in Australia’s population growth, pointing to the recent dramatic increase in the 2050 forecast for Australia’s population from 28 million to 35 million. This revised forecast had a powerful impact, resulting in heated discussion about the social, ecological, and economic implications of what would be the fastest population growth of any developed country in the world.

Well there are already plenty of opinions flying around and some excellent comments on my post yesterday Australians are #1 globally in usage of social media: Why?, which pointed to new research showing this startling result. I guess it’s time for me to offer some of my thoughts, helped along by the conversation so far. Be sure to read the insightful comments on the topic!

To my mind the question is less why Australians are such heavy users of social media, as why the uptake was so slow initially before a startling acceleration over the last couple of years. Here are a few initial thoughts.

Attitudes about the individual.
One of the most famed aspects of Australian culture is the ‘tall poppy’ syndrome (your head might get lopped off). This has tempered much over the years, but there has still been until recently a relative reticence to stand up and shout out personal opinions (with of course a number of notable exceptions). I felt this contributed to the initial slow uptake by Australians of blogging. Perhaps once enough people are expressing their views on social media, you no longer stand out by blogging and Twittering – you are in a majority and your self-expression is unleashed.

Some very interesting data just out from Nielsen on social media usage. The headline is that people in developed countries are spending 82% more time on social media than they were one year ago.

However the data point that struck my interest most is that...

Australia is #1 globally in usage of social media

This is a real news. For many years I was bemoaning the slow uptake of social networks in Australia. Research featured as late as our Future of Media Report 2007 showed that Australia was dramatically behind the US and UK in Facebook usage, though it was beginning to catch up on usage of MySpace usage and tools such as Photobucket.

Here is a video of a very interesting interview of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg by Mike Arrington of Techcrunch.

There are a number of very interesting comments by Zuckerberg in the interview, including on how Facebook Connect is so fundamental to the company. He said that "obviously much more is going to be developed outside of Facebook than inside," meaning that the development of Facebook into a platform is critical.

More controversial was Zuckerberg's comments on privacy. At around 3:15 in the video he says:

"People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time. We view it as our role in the system to constantly be innovating and be updating what our system is to reflect what the current social norms are."

This prompted Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb to write a long diatribe, saying:

I don't buy Zuckerberg's argument that Facebook is now only reflecting the changes that society is undergoing. I think Facebook itself is a major agent of social change and by acting otherwise Zuckerberg is being arrogant and condescending.

This is a fascinating issue. I and many others - including Zuckerberg - have been surprised through this decade by quite how much people have been prepared to share, given the opportunity by the rapid rise of Web 2.0 tools. Undoubtedly there has been a rapid evolution of social attitudes to privacy, as many people have discovered that they are in fact comfortable sharing some personal information.

For the last few years Richard Watson of NowandNext has created annual trend maps based on city subway maps. This year he has been more ambitious, creating a highly detailed map with five time zones, ranging from 2010-2015 out to 2035-2050.

For the previous three trend maps (shown at the bottom) I collaborated with Richard and we co-branded them with Future Exploration Network, however time pressures this year meant that I haven't directly contributed to the 2010 map. It is still as rich and glorious as ever - spend some time delving into the trends ahead!

MEGATRENDS OF THE TREND MAP
- Ageing
- Power shift Eastwards
- Globalisation
- Localisation
- Digitalisation
- Personalisation
- Volatility
- Individualism
- Environmental change
- Sustainability
- Debt
- Urbanisation

Other 2009 summary posts
Top blog posts of 2009: 6 on Twitter and the media
Top blog posts of 2009: Enterprise 2.0 and organizational effectiveness
Top blog posts of 2009: The future
Top keynote speech presentations/ videos of 2009

And one more summary of my blog posts that have attracted the most interest this year, this time on the topic of influence, which has become very central to my interests and research.

1. Launch of the Influence Landscape framework (Beta)
A visual framework to explain the role and mechanisms of influence today

2. “Influence is the future of media”
Why influence is at the center of where the media industry is going

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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 Ocakoğlu 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.