Here's an idea: what if after the State of the Union and the minority party's response, we have Neil deGrasse Tyson speak to the country for an hour?
In this speech to the 28th National Space Symposium, NDT explains how the space race changed American culture for the better and took the economy in new directions. The issue couldn't be more important given the need to expand STEM funding, and even moreso, inspire a generation to take advantage of it.
He recounts how a single image, Earthrise Over the Moon, changed how humanity thought of itself.
We finally saw Earth, he says, "not as the mapmaker would have you identify it...but as nature intended it to be viewed." He traces the path of the borderless earth meme through the launch of the "Whole Earth Catalog" (1968), creation of Earth Day (1970) and a raft of environmental regulations. On the founding of "Doctors Without Borders" in 1971, he challenges, "Where do you even get that phrase from? No one thought of that phrase before that photo was published. Because every globe in your classroom has countries painted on it."
If you're a PR pro, you'll especially enjoy his thoughts on:
For the last few months, I've been breaking my own guideline about not covering two topics in one blog. The fact is, the PR/Marketing Futurism folks, which SellingTomorrows.com is for, don't care as much about social media. Or if you do, you want to read about it in a blog that's tightly focused on that topic. And the B2B Social Media crowd isn't as interested in how the perception of the future has changed over time and the ways marketers use the premise of the future to sell things.
So...I've launched a SECOND blog, this one just focused on B2B Social Media. I call it the B2B Formula (b2bformula.com).
Both blogs will continue, and in fact, there's some great news coming down the pike about SellingTomorrows, so stay tuned for that!
My apologies for skipping out on posts the last month...I've been working on a very exciting white paper that has entered the wild today: The CMO's Guide to Tweetups. Nine delicious pages chock full of research, rationales, strategies and tactics designed to help CMO's and heads of public relations at Business-to-Business companies use launch their own tweetups.
While most of the tips came from my experience at NASA's tweetup of the launch of shuttle Atlantis in November, all the strategic sections are based on Makovsky's work with B2B's that sell complex services, products and -- at its root -- ideas to customers and investors.
For many companies in this space, using social media at all, much less hosting a tweetup, can seem strange. But as readers of this blog know, when it comes to complex ideas, there's no better medium for educating audiences, and then engaging them all the way down the marketing funnel than social media.
I invite you to take a read and add your thoughts in the comments section below.
You know you're living in interesting times when Ron Paul's amendment
to audit the Federal Reserve gets passed out of committee 43-26. But then again, 10%
unemployment has prodded a lot of people to start questioning some
fundamentals.
Like most utopias, "flight" says more about the times in which it was written than those that came to pass. And yet it's worth reading because the eerie similarities to today reveal how darned constant and consistent our utopic hopes are. Hopes that go back for thousands of years. Understanding the intricacies of this dynamic is the key to laying out a CONVINCING vision of tomorrow.
Plus, it's just really fun to read.
This week kicks off a special 3-post look at "Flight." I hope you enjoy.Each week, Popular Science is summarizing its news about the future by creating images that mash up their latest stories. The art is really something (sorry, they haven't enabled image sharing features, so you'll have to go to the site to see), and it's worth checking out.
In this brilliant mix of original thinking, legal insights and pop culture, Cracked reveals the "6 Insane Laws We'll Need in the Future." snip:
"From the war on drugs to gay marriage to file sharing, it seems like the law is in a continual, often losing, battle to keep up with the modern world. But it's only going to get worse from here. Advances in genetic engineering and AI are going to change what it means to be human, and that means lots and lots of work for the future's lawyers."
There was a gem of a quote in today's NY Times coverage of the Obama's state dinner hosting India. The First Lady, talking to some schoolchildren, said:
“Who knows, maybe one of you all sitting at this table, one of our little mentees, will be living and studying somewhere in India — maybe New Delhi or Mumbai or Bangalore,” the first lady said. “Just imagine that. Start thinking about your future in that way. This visit at this table is the beginning of that for all of you.”
While this will send chills down the backs of those who fear Fareed Zakaria's "rise of the rest," I think it's one of those perfect statements that can captivate a young person's mind about worlds far beyond their home towns, exotic cultures that reveal we have as much in common with other nations as not, and the chance to learn and think and do in a world that's becoming more global by the day. I'm looking forward to reading a Times article in 30 years about how one of those kids took Ms. Obama's advice to heart and did something great.
(Picture from August 2008)
I'm a big believer in the power of rational and emotional messages' ability to change people's minds about innovations, but eating cloned human meat?
In this feature on LiveScience.com, Mark Post, a biomedical engineer from the Netherlands, says, "In principle, we could harvest the meat progenitor cells from fresh human cadavers and grow meat from them," Post said. "Once taken out of its disease and animalistic, cannibalistic context — you are not killing fellow citizens for it, they are already dead — there is no reason why not...Still, Post suggests that marketing could overcome such hurdles. "If every package of naturally grown meat by law should have the text, 'Beware, animals have been killed for this product,' I can imagine a gradual cultural shift," Post said. "Of course, we still have a long way to go to make a product that is even remotely competitive with current products.'"
The article brings up a lot of good points about how cloned meat -- chicken, beef, etc. -- would reduce CO2 levels and feed the hungry. It's worth reading, if not totally...consuming.
How would YOU market cloned beef? Would any argument convince you to eat cloned human meat?
Farhad Majoo has concluded his two-part look at the Y2K anniversary on Slate, and given its study of how one vision of the future was widely believed and stopped, and another is mostly believed and MIGHT be stopped, it's worth careful study. Snip:
"Davison says the most important difference between Y2K and global warming is the cultural attitude surrounding each case. Y2K never became a moral issue. "It was always framed as a simple design error," Davison says—nobody fingered it as the consequence of our reliance on digital technology or argued that the way to get out of this mess was to get rid of computers. The debate over climate change, meanwhile, has always been as much a social and political argument as a scientific one. "Climate change brings into view questions about modern society in general," the Australian scientist says. It's not just a question of what fuel we should use to power the planet—there are questions about where we should live, what we should eat, how we should travel. "It's become a general debate over modernity itself," Davison says."
The Paleofuture blog has dug up another retro-future gem of an article. This one, from the Gastonia Gazette, quotes a very worried man who wonders, "There is reason to fear, as some do, that free time, forced free time, will bring on the restless tick of boredom, idleness, immorality, and increased personal violence."
Such worries frequently accompany articles about the future, with the utopians saying new technologies will lead to a paradise with no work to do, with dystopians saying it will lead to more vice. Looks like we have just 10 years left to figure out a solution.
In his argument that U.S. education needs to focus on both the sciences and humanities, Alan Brinkley of Columbia neatly summarizes how we embraced science at the start of the 20th century, only to turn to the humanities when it failed to fix -- well.. us.
"In the heady progressive years of the early 20th century, few things were more alluring than the promise of scientific knowledge. In a world struggling with rapid industrialization, massive immigration, and chaotic urban growth, science and technology seemed to offer solutions to almost every problem...Many Americans came to believe that scientific certainty could solve not only scientific problems, but could also reform politics, government, and business. Two world wars and a Great Depression rocked the confidence of many people that scientific expertise alone could create a prosperous and ordered world. In the aftermath of World War II, the academic world turned with new enthusiasm to humanistic studies, which seemed to many scholars the best way to ensure the survival of democracy and to resist tyranny."
Read the full article from Newsweek here.
Check out past posts on the oscillation between utopian/dystopian visions of the future here, here and here.
One of the media's favorite news hooks is to cite a "scientific controversy." It's an attention grabber because most people believe that science is set in stone, and that it's one of the few sectors of public life that's opinion-free. Gary Herstein wrote a great post on the subject in July, and it's worth the full read. Snip:
"Real scientific controversies casually require decades to play themselves out, and MSM journalists generally have neither the time nor the training to follow such play with the kind of nuance required to accurately portray them."
