Selling Tomorrows

Google Searches Expose Our Hunger for Predictions

What can Google's search data reveal about our hunger to know today what will happen tomorrow? 

Using Google Trends and Google’s Keyword Tool, I examined the top 350 future-oriented keywords.  Combined, they represent 152,620,240 searches a month.  Here are four of the major trends uncovered.  

1.  We think about the future most often in December and least often in July.  The motivation behind this clockwork activity goes beyond New Year’s resolutions.  People are looking for predictions about their careers, spouses, industries and even countries. 

 

2.  Four industries are top of mind: One third of the 350 keywords focus on just four sectors -- Technology, Auto, Entertainment and Finance.  Anecdotally, we know that the concepts of technology and the future are often linked.  What's different now is we can measure the degree to which that’s true.  We also see the presence of sectors that aren’t as obviously linked to futurism. 

 

 

3. The only countries present in the data are the U.S., India and Pakistan. I’ll leave it to others to guess why that's the case, but what’s startling is the absence of searches for European, Asian and African nations. 

 

4. Psychics?  Really???  One in five future-oriented keywords reveal people looking for straight-out predictions. Together, they represent 34,889,400 searches a month!  That's intriguing at first blush, but the data quickly takes a dismaying turn.  Nearly everyone is looking to supernatural sources, like psychics and astrology, rather than rational ones grounded in science or professional forecasting. Maybe it's all in good fun looking up horoscopes, but still...99% is a big number.

Other interesting findings:

• Jobs: There are 482,100 searches a month for terms related to future careers
• Job security?  The term "future proof" is searched 18,100 times per month
• Trends:  “Future trends” is Google'd 74,000 times a month.  

How does this square with your expectations about how other people feel about the future?  Leave your comments below, and check out Google Trends and Google's Keyword tool and play around with the data.  If you see something interesting, please share!

 

 

Meteorologists Carefully Add Chaos to their Communications

In "The Weatherman is Not a Moron," Nate Silver gives a fascinating tour of how forecast models have evolved and delves into how uncertainty is communicated to the public.  

First up is the idea of modeling and an idea that Hari Selden himself would feel at home with. Snip:

"In 1814, the French mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace postulated that the movement of every particle in the universe should be predictable as long as meteorologists could know the position of all those particles and how fast they are moving. Unfortunately, the number of molecules in the earth’s atmosphere is perhaps on the order of 100 tredecillion, which is a 1 followed by 44 zeros. To make perfect weather predictions, we would not only have to account for all of those molecules, but we would also need to solve equations for all 100 tredecillion of them at once."

Strikingly, it's the integration of the unknown into models that is making them more accurate. Like stock traders, meteorologists have begun to play the odds, acknowledging that they're an inherent part of the system.  

Unfortunately, communicating that uncertainty carries cultural baggage, motivating experts to hold back their full analysis. Private sector forecasters have a "wet" bias for predictions of rain, because the public is happy if it's sunny when rain is predicted, and angry if it rains when sun is forecast. In a more serious situation, Silver reports there was a storm in 1997 in Grand Forks North Dakota where the forecast's margin of error wasn't shared with the public.  The result?  Millions in damage that could have been averted through mitigation efforts like sandbagging.  

"The forecasters later told researchers that they were afraid the public might lose confidence in the forecast if they had conveyed any uncertainty."

How James Bond's Gadgets Created a Gadget-Expecting Culture

Check out this great article in the Washington Post that explores how Bond movies prepared a generation for gadgets. It notes, "Bond taught us to think big when it comes to innovation, and it was never 'incremental' — it was always terribly 'disruptive.'"  Here's the slideshow. 

World Science Festival to Feature "Future of Internet" & Storytelling Seminars

Tickets for the World Science Festival have just gone on sale, and two events promise new insights on how we perceive the future.  

The first features Vinton Cerf and is called "Internet Everywhere: the Future of History's Most Disruptive Technology."  Hey, anytime we can compare technological revolutions, it's going to be a good day!  I'm hoping for some good historical parallels and (if we're lucky) points on how economic systems will be changed.  The intersection of a deep recession with the rise of social technologies has got to be one of the more unusual things to happen in the past 1,000 years. 

The second event is called "Why We Tell Stories, the Science of Narrative."  The panelists will address whether storytelling has an evolutionary advantage, and I bet there will be some interesting facets on why we come up with such richly detailed stories about tomorrow and why they follow utopic/dystopic patterns. 

I'll be live-tweeting at @davidhrosen, with summary reports to follow here. Drop me a line if you're going!

 

Author of "Future: A Recent History" Speaking at NY Public Library Tuesday

From the NYPL's page:

"Author @ the Library presents: "Future: a Recent History"with Lawrence R. Samuel.

The future is not a fixed idea but a highly variable one that reflects the values of those who are imagining it. By studying the ways that visionaries imagined the future--particularly that of America--in the past century, much can be learned about the cultural dynamics of the time. In this social history, the writer examines the future visions of intellectuals, artists, scientists, businesspeople, and others to tell a chronological story about the history of the future in the past century."

The talk starts at 6:30pm at the Mid-Manhattan Library, 455 Fifth Avenue.

Read my review of Future: a Recent History" here.

New Book: "Future: A Recent History" Will Change the Way You Think About Tomorrow Today

I’ve just finished reading Lawrence Samuel’s new book, “Future: A Recent History.” Suffice it to say, I’ve underlined a fifth of its passages, written in the margins of almost every page and scribbled dozens of check marks for the "wow" insights I want to remember later.  It’s that good.

 

The book explores 100 years of history in 200 dense pages, taking readers on a tour of how people's expectations of the future have changed over time.  An ambitious number of topics are covered -- politics, religion, class, gender, pop culture, fashion, the home, business, jobs, travel, architecture, and lots of science and technology.  But the payoff is equally large, as Samuel’s brisk writing style delivers a fascinating look into an aspect of our culture that we are barely conscious exists.

 

Marketers and PR professionals will find Future to be an especially valuable tool for better understanding target audiences.  If you needed proof that your vision of tomorrow needs to adapt to people’s preconceptions of what’s ahead, this work offers plenty.  And while Samuel doesn't take on what people are thinking right now (many others do that) his voyage through history teaches you how to spot the patterns.

 

It’s worth noting that a lot of books make fun of futurists who have gotten things wrong.  Rightly so.  Many of them are hysterical and it's part of what makes this topic fun.  Not Samuel.  He found a chillingly large number of predictions that have come true.  Sure, sometimes the predictor got the technology right and its impact on society wrong, or vice versa.  But there are patterns to the errors, and understanding them will help you be a better marketer, historian or futurist when it comes to dissecting and using predictions.

 

If all that’s not enough, the exhaustive research that went into this work offers a treasure trove of books, articles and pop culture moments to be further explored by anyone interested in futurism. 

 

A worthy successor to I.F. Clarke's "The Pattern of Expectation," "Future: A Recent  History" will change the way you see tomorrow today.

engadget: "Best conception of the future we've seen in the past five minutes"

Engadget picked up this brilliant video from ASUS which depicts a future where desks have interactive surfaces.  It's a fun vid, but my favorite part of the package is engadget's headline, "best conception of the future we've seen in the past five minutes."  

Sure, it's tempting for marketers to say their new technology is going to re-make the world and then throw out a vision where their product has made our lives utopic.  But let's admit it:  very few even have the potential to change our lives dramatically, much less overcome all the inertia (old way of doing business, competition) needed to actually make it happen.  No, sometimes the innovations that really change us are hidden.  Vaccines, which freed us from so many of the fears our grandparents held. Or the invention of the Limited Liability Corporation, which allow people to take risks through their businesses while protecting their personal assets.  Those innovations have changed our world a lot more than iPods ever have or could. 

So...um...where did they say I can get this desk?

10 free lessons on futuring from the World Future Society

The WFS is offering a free 10-week email series called "Fundamentals of Foresight.  Sign up here and each week you'll get a lengthy email that explains a futuring technique. Here's an excerpt from lesson six, "Wild Cards." 

"On one level, we love wild card events. We love them as big-budget spectacles in Hollywood movies, from The Day After Tomorrow (global warming) to I Am Legend (global epidemic) and many others. In these movies, the entire planet is caught completely off-guard, governments and citizens alike entirely unprepared for the devastation that is about to be unleashed upon them. That's a large part of what makes these movies so entertaining to watch. But if such events were to happen in real life, we would prefer to follow the old Boy Scout motto and Be Prepared! So, let's prepare ourselves. Seatbelts fastened everyone? Good. Let's begin."