The changing nature of television, including how new platforms and content delivery methods are being developed, is something I've been working on for a while. A great example of the changes afoot is Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, a new project of writer-producer Joss Whedon. Bored during the television writers’ strike, Whedon—the mastermind behind cult fave Buffy the Vampire Slayer—along with his brothers devised a short-form musical story to be broadcast over the Internet. The result is a perfect example of what we mean when we talk about power shifting to content producers with the advent of these new delivery platforms. Following the "airing" of the first (of three parts), the show racked up more than 300,000 Google hits and more than 100 Google News hits, and is the top selling video on iTunes. (That people are paying $1.99 for something they can watch for free is the subject of an entirely different blog post.)

Granted, the popularity and seeming success of this is due in part to Whedon’s large and enthusiastic fan base, but nevertheless, television programming execs should be nervous. You can hit the link at the top to watch but hurry, it is only online for a limited time.

We were pleased to see our Speed of Change Index covered in the new issue of Foreign Policy.

As the magazine says,

How swiftly or slowly life changes in particular countries is the subject of the Speed of Change Index, which measures changes in urbanization, literacy, GDP per capita, civil liberties, and access to a telephone, TV, and the Internet in countries during the last 15 years.... The index reveals where citizens' needs are rapidly changing, new markets are opening, and the risk of instability runs high.

The magazine's graphic shows selected countries in Europe, Africa, and Asia, but the index actually includes nearly every country on Earth, with the exception of some microstates.

Image: Social Technologies

Apparently, some old gas pumps are confused: they were never designed to have gas priced over $3.99/gallon. Back in the 1940s and 1950s, the manufacturers could never imagine that prices could go beyond $3.99, so they didn't bother to make the gas gauge go higher.

Oops.

This little anecdote reminded us at S)T how people limit their concept of the future: clearly, back in the 50s it was unimaginable that gas prices would ever be higher than $3.99/gallon.

The bottom line? The improbable can and does happen. That's why we futurists set out to consider all possibilities, and urge our clients to think about the consequences of even the improbable.

Image: Jonny Hunter (Flickr)

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Color me old--though I get made fun of here at Social Technologies because I’m the youngest employee--but I was shocked to see this recent Pew Internet and American Life survey that shows Internet-speak is creeping into teens’ school assignments.

The survey revealed that in school assignments:

• 64% of teens have used “informal” chat-style writing
• 50% of teens don’t use proper capitalization and punctuation
• 38% use common Internet-speak abbreviations such as “LOL” and “OMG”
• 25% have used emoticons--yes, emoticons, those annoying symbols to denote mood :(
  

What?! In school assignments? These statistics do seem ridiculous. But, assuming they’re relatively accurate, imagine what the future of writing, grammar, and communication will be. What scares me is that the majority of my generation seem to find it acceptable to write "formally" in this manner. Will correct spelling and grammar vanish, replaced by LOLCat speak?

Click to read more ...

As futurists in Washington DC, we were struck by the Washington Post's article laying out scenarios for the region's future 17 years from now.

The two scenarios might be called "bad" and "worse":

• In the first, people are fearful and isolated, and the culture is deeply split by class.
• In the second, people are even more fearful and security-obsessed.

We don't want to be Tuesday morning quarterbacks, but my colleagues had these observations:

• Think positive. Scenarios give you the chance to lay out both the bad and the good outcomes, and use the latter to seek out desirable pathways. According to these scenarios, the future is bleak indeed.
• Most change is slow. To begin with, most of the buildings and transportation infrastructures of 2025 are already in place. Cities--outside of China at least--are not remade in a generation.
• Changes in values tend to be even slower. Will American values shift drastically in the next 17 years? It seems pretty unlikely, given that the decisionmakers of the 2020s are already in their thirties and forties, if not older. In other words, we already know about their values and attitudes in large part, barring drastic discontinuities. 
• Consider what is inevitable. The author of this article says that the only point of consensus was that "the haves would have more," but that is a social choice, not a law of nature. Other societies have chosen differently, as have Americans in the past, and the pendulum may swing again before too long.
• More broadly, we get to choose the future. In a democratic, capitalist society, people can shift outcomes with votes and purchases. The people in these scenarios seemed beset by outcomes they would not have chosen. We can, I think, do better.

Image: Joey Gannon (Flickr)

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We've been working on a system for measuring the speed of change in societies around the world. We thought it might be working pretty well when we plugged in the data, ran the formula, and it spit China out as the world's fastest-changing society. (Among developed nations, Taiwan came out as the fastest-moving, which also seemed about right.)

A recent Washington Post article revealed what this could mean in people's lives.

It told the story of Huang He, who left China in 1996 to study media in the United States. After 10 years, he has returned, and finds himself in an unfamiliar land.

"China is not the same China I remember. People's values have changed," he says. "People think in a more complicated way."

His once-proud father seems to feel that Huang has been left behind: "Many of your peers who did not study overseas, they all seem to be better off. Many of them were not as outstanding as you were in school. But those who didn't leave got caught up in the fast-paced development of China."

Huang sees the results of that pace of development everywhere. Propaganda goals have been replaced by the quest for ratings in Chinese media. Even the buildings have changed: old houses are gone, with "modern brick and tile boxes" in their place.

Facing 10 years of change in one of the world's fastest-moving societies would strain anyone's capacity for newness. For Huang, it may be too much: he is thinking of leaving again.

Image: Point-Shoot-Edit (Flickr)