Future of massmedia

An interesting and though provoking post by Michael Arrington pointing back to what is happening with mass media’s role.

• If “Real Journalism” Fails As A Business, Should Government Step In?

In Davos last week the media seemed to heavily cover the media discussions there, and so was Don Tapscott. It is an interesting discussion about the [mass] media company’s future, because things seems to be shaking pretty bad now. Especially when a panel consisting of among others Paul Saffo and Peter Schwartz predict the death of the print newspaper in 2014.

• BBC NEWS | dot.life | Mobile video at Davos
• Wikinomics » Broadcasting won’t be broad, and it won’t be casting
• A Futurist Panel At The World Economic Forum Suggests Print Newspapers Will Cease By 2014 So Should We Start Packing Our Bags?

Rising food prices

More and more factors seems to do the same thing – boost the food price. Previous analysis of the food price development thinks it will rise and plateau on a new but higher level. I, on the contrary, think there is a food chance that we will see much more instability in food prices for exactly the same reasons that we have been having fluctuating oil prices for some years – the gap between supply and demand will shrink and create much more instability. And together with all other instability due to climate effects and other non-linear effects which are increasing in a more connected world it will be a real ride for some time come. At least until the system have found another equilibrium in 30 years or so… So hang on!

• FuturePundit: Lester Brown Sees Higher Food Prices Due To Biomass Energy

[To those of you who wan't to read some more about the rising food prices, there are very few recent articles available on the net, but here are a couple:

• World food stocks dwindling rapidly, UN warns - International Herald Tribune
• Food prices | Cheap no more | Economist.com
• Food prices | The end of cheap food | Economist.com ]

Digitalization of the analog world

Invisible to most people RFID technology is very soon starting to invade our world in big number and will have effects in many areas, even if these effects are hard to understand the ramifications of now.

• Microchips Everywhere: a Future Vision

Another technology for digitizing the analog world is the 2D “bar”-codes called QR Code, which have been very popular in Japan for quite some time. Now Google seems to have included them in one of the plans for world domination.

• Google’s Newspaper Ads: Big Hopes For Small Barcodes (GOOG) – Silicon Alley Insider

Others looking for trends and further

An article in Wall Street Journal about how technology will change the way we shop, learn and entertain ourselves.

• Thinking About Tomorrow – WSJ.com

Following up last year’s success of drawing a beautiful trend-map based on the London tube map, Ross Dawson present a new map for 2008+ derived from Shanghai underground routes.

• Trends in the Living Networks: See our latest Trend Map! What to expect in 2008 and beyond….

FringHog have collected links to five technology road maps – Metaverse Roadmap, DARPA Tech 2007, EURON Roboethics Roadmap, Technology Roadmap for Productive Nanosystems and Microsoft’s Toward 2020 Science. Go and dig deeper!

• FringeHog» Blog Archive » FringeHog Friday Five: Technology Roadmaps

Technorati Tags: future, future of mass media, link collection, Davos 2008, rising food price, trends & driving forces

My standing ovations!!

(I think all public speakers have a lot to learn from Hans!)

• “Järn Hans: En bok om men” (Iron John: A book about men) by Robert Bly
• “Det Infantila Samhället” (translates to The Infantile Society) by Carl Hamilton

These books are here and there giving me bits and pieces about my personal questions and development. What strikes me when I am reading them is that they are both pointing in the direction of huge societal problems, but from a personal or cultural perspective. Both of them are talking about responsibility and about this has been left out in our modern definition of being grown up. It seems that our society defines adults only by measuring age and not by judging their values and behaviours.

Robert Bly points out the problems emerging when you never take the traditonal steps towards being a man. Young men never pass the steps towards responsibility and adulthood by learning from other men what it is all about, how you relate to yourself and how you relate to the world when your power grows and you are increasing your sphere of influence.

Carl Hamilton is focused on the changes in society when kids learn from everywhere about the attributes and behaviours how to be grown up, but never understand the consequences or the underlying reasons behind the surface. Think e g about kids being socially thought to behave sexually, but lack the sex drive and feelings of an adult. What is more important he points in the directions of how parents doesn’t react because they (we) are busy trying to ignore what it is to be grown up.

Hamilton sums up many things when he tells us parents that we are completely misguided when we leave the kids at the grand parents for a weekend so that we can enjoy ourselves in a free and adult way. To us it is adult behaviour to go to the movies and then to a restaurant and eat without having to think about the children all the time. This is according to Hamilton a fundamental mistake since being without kids and having the freedom to go to the movies, to the restaurant and then come home late is more related to the life of the traditional teen agers or young people without children. To be adult means having responsibility for our family, and of course we can take a pause from that once in a while. But believing that freedom from a family and resonsibility has something to do with an adult life is a fundamental misconception.

Sometimes we are looking at the macro level to understand the current development in the world. I think these two books in a very good way are talking about how structural and values changes at the micro level but they stops short when it comes to see how it builds up to emergent effects at a macro level.

It reminds me of how Adam Kahane ends his lecture How to change the world.

Let me end and summarize with a story about a rabbi who, like me, set out to change the world. He found that he wasn’t making much progress, so he tried to change his country. This was also too difficult so he tried to change his neighborhood. When he didn’t have success there, he tried to change his family. Even that was easier said than done, so he tried to change himself.
Then an interesting thing happened. When he had changed himself, his family changed. And when his family changed, his neighborhood changed. When his neighborhood changed, his country changed. And when his country changed, the world changed.

Diamond har identifierat fem huvudsakliga orsaker till att samhällen går under. Dessa formulerades i en review av Stewart Brand i Wired som

• miljöförstöring
• klimatförändring
• fientliga grannar
• brutna handelsförbindelser
• dumhet

där en eller två av dessa plus dumhet är tillräckligt för att få en civilisation på fall.

I boken finns även exempel på hur samarbete, anpassning och aktiv minskning av intressekonflikter ibland kan uppstå:

A good example of a society minimizing such clashes of interest is the Netherlands, whose citizens have perhaps the world’s highest level of environmental awareness and of membership in environmental organizations. I never understood why, until on a recent trip to the Netherlands I posed the question to three of my Dutch friends while driving through their countryside. Their answer was one I shall never forget:

“Just look around you here. All of this farmland that you see lies below sea level. One-fifth of the total area of the Netherlands is below sea level–as much as 22 feet below–because it used to be shallow bays, and we reclaimed it from the sea by surrounding the bays with dikes and then gradually pumping out the water. We have a saying, ‘God created the Earth, but we Dutch created the Netherlands.’ These reclaimed lands are called ‘polders.’ We began draining them nearly a thousand years ago. Today, we still have to keep pumping out the water that gradually seeps in. That’s what our windmills used to be for, to drive the pumps to pump out the polders. Now we use steam, diesel, and electric pumps instead. In each polder there are lines of pumps, starting with those farthest from the sea, pumping the water in sequence until the last pump finally pumps it out into a river or the ocean. In the Netherlands, we have another expression: ‘You have to be able to get along with your enemy, because he may be the person operating the neighboring pump in your polder.’ And we’re all down in the polders together. It’s not the case that rich people live safely up on the tops of the dikes while poor people live down in the polder bottoms below sea level. If the dikes and pumps fail, we’ll all drown together. When a big storm and high tides swept inland over Zeeland Province on February 1, 1953, nearly 2,000 Dutch people, both rich and poor, drowned. We swore that we would never let that happen again, and the whole country paid for an extremely expensive set of tide barriers. If global warming causes polar ice melting and a world rise in sea level, the consequences will be more severe for the Netherlands than for any other country in the world, because so much of our land is already below sea level. That’s why we Dutch are so aware of our environment. We’ve learned through our history that we’re all living in the same polder and that our survival depends on each other’s survival.”

Detta är en bok för beslutsfattare och andra som uppehåller det beteende och de konflikter vårt samhälle är fyllt av idag. Även om den enligt flera recensenter inte har samma höjd som sin föregångare Guns, Germs and Steel innehåller dem många tänkvärda exempel och resonemang.

Det är lätt att själv dra tanken ett steg till och fundera på om resonemanget även gäller t ex företag. Likheterna är faktiskt slående när det gäller organisationers ofömåga att reagera på och anpassa sig till omvärldens förändringar.

Klicka på boken för att köpa eller kika mer.