High Quality
Open the downloaded document, and select print from the file menu (PDF reader required).
T
he futurists and analysts at SocialTechnologies have spent yearsanalyzing global consumertrends for our clients. We groupedthese trends into five categories: de-mography, rising wealth, culture, in-frastructure, and values. In the lastissue of THE FUTURIST, we de-scribed global trends related to risingglobal wealth and changing demo-graphics. Now we turn to trends inculture, public infrastructure, andvalues that will be shaping yourworld in the years to come.
Cultural Trends
Just a decade or so ago, sociolo-gists and best-selling authors such asBenjamin Barber, author of
Jihad vs. McWorld: How Globalism and Tribalism Are Reshaping the World
(Ballantine1996), were concerned about ahomogenization of global culturedominated by the United States andits powerful entertainment industry.It was feared that Hollywood and
Baywatch
were taking over the globalculture.It turns out that local cultures aremore robust than was thought. Peo-ple are quite capable of taking the as-pects of global culture they like, ig-noring the rest, and holding tight towhat they love about their nativecultures. The following cluster of
By Andy Hines
Global Trends in Culture,Infrastructure, and Values
Electrification and broadband communications are contributing to profoundshifts in global values and cultures.
EDGE69 / ISTOCKPHOTO.COM
18
THE FUTURIST
September-October 2008
www.wfs.org
nomic crisis could arise. In China, forinstance, allocating too much agri-cultural activity to the water-scarcenorth has already resulted in watershortages in that region.Third, rising energy costs may endup favoring more diversity at the lo-cal level, rather than global central-ization and distribution schemes.
Trend 2: Media spread.
While me-dia is spreading rapidly, there is stillplenty of room for expansion. Just19% of the global population is onthe Internet, and half the world’spopulation has mobile phones. Obvi-ously, penetration rates are muchhigher in W1 than W2 and W3. Evenso, few places on the planet still lackaccess. Solar-powered wireless set-ups mean that even remote areas of
global communications grid.Some repressive governments such
and to some extent China have beenable to limit access to media, butsuch countries are likely fighting alosing battle in the long run. Humaningenuity and the desire for unfet-tered access to information are strongallies.
Business implication
s: Perhaps themore interesting longer-term ques-tion is this: How do we get around
time? Perhaps communication-freezones, or even blocks of time, mayemerge. Organizations may say thatSundays are off-limits except from
There may also be money to bemade actually selling freedom
from
communications. Remember the oldtelevision show
Fantasy Island?
Per-haps we’ll see a new
Privacy Island.
Whereas Internet access used to be aperk, inaccessibility could be a futureperk.The concept is not entirely new.
-thor of
Society of the Spectacle,
argued
mass media had a toxic effect on
spaces to be set aside as mass-media-free zones, places where peoplecould experience “a moment of life,”without the intrusion of any sort of media or any commercial message.The situationists in essence were thefirst group to perceive a market forvice, is it likely that other regions (ornations) will readily adapt and moveto other products and services? Somenations are already experimentingwith this concept on a microscale. Ja-pan’s Teletopia project seeks to link
-work, with each city specializing ininformation technology applications.
Business implications:
While thisidea of a global division of labor iscompelling from an efficiency pointof view, there are challenges to thisapproach. First, it requires a high de-gree of trust that dominant centers of excellence will play fair. It would re-quire appropriate checks and bal-ances — and national security will bea concern.Second, there is the danger of toomuch efficiency creating fragile sys-tems that lack resiliency (see BarryC. Lynn’s excellent treatment in
Endof the Line: The Rise and Coming Fall of the Global Corporation
). For example,if all production is centered in a cer-tain area, and a natural disaster, oreven an unforeseen natural phenom-enon, hits that area, a global eco-trends explores how some of this willshake out in the coming decades.
Trend 1: Cultural multipolarity
.New centers of cultural excellenceare arising across the globe. For in-stance, the world’s largest film in-dustry is in India. Nokia, in Finland,has emerged as a leader in mobile
-tions flows a decade or two agowould have characterized informa-tion flows with one-way arrows fromW1 to W2 to W3 — with the United
map today, and into the future, willmore likely be characterized bymany two-way arrows, as W1 in-creasingly recognizes the value of ideas from across the globe.This trend raises an interesting is-sue about the emergence of culturalcenters of excellence and their poten-tial influence on the global division
-nomically and culturally, our globalcivilization may become more so-phisticated about this division of la- bor. If a certain region provides the best of a particular product or ser-
Consumer Trends in ThreeDifferent Worlds, Part 2
In my previous article for THEFUTURIST, I discussed 10 of themost important trends changingthe face of business in three differ-ent “worlds.” Throughout the analy-sis, we referred to World 1 (W1),World 2 (W2), and World 3 (W3) asour three “worlds” based on an in-dex that rates a country’s economicand social development and techno-logical capability and groups themamong peers.The United States, westernEurope, Japan, Korea, and Australiawere counted in W1, which consists offewer than a billion people in the afflu-ent countries.W2 is the large segment of 3 to4 billion in the nations or regionsthat are relatively balanced interms of needs and resources, suchas fast-growing India and China andslower-growing Latin America andeastern Europe.W3 consists of the 1 to 2 billionpeople who are in dire straits,including most of Africa,Bangladesh, and Haiti.
— Andy Hines
THE FUTURIST
September-October 2008
www.wfs.org
19
this support. Several organizationsworking together will be better ableto tackle these issues systematically.
Trend 4: Electrification.
Global ac-cess to electricity has risen by a littlemore than 10% annually, up from
-zations like the International Energy
forecast that electrification will reach83% by 2030 and view it as a funda-mental piece of infrastructure be-cause it opens up access to a widerange of products and services. It is akey to raising living standards, andemerging-market governments areseeking to bring electricity to ruralcommunities to stimulate develop-ment.That said, some regions continueto have dismally low rates of electri-
was just 23% in 2000, and somecountries do even worse — such as
Business implications:
Electrification brings about significant changes todaily life, making it easier for peopleto cook, do chores, work after dark,and access information and “enter-tainment.” It typically increases thepace of daily life. It is also a pre-cursor to bringing nations into a con-sumer economy.
Trend 5: Networked world.
To statethe obvious, the network is spread-ing — and not just in W1, but every-from Southampton in the UnitedKingdom, which is experimentingwith the adoption of the three-wheel“tuk-tuks” commonly seen incrowded megacities in W2 and W3.Traffic planners noted how effectivethese vehicles were for navigating inextremely dense traffic situations,and they figured an adapted versionwould be a neat solution to densetraffic in their W1 city.This suggests that organizationswill benefit from having eyes andears trained to remote corners acrossthe globe in order to stay on the lead-ing edge of creative and innovativeideas. But “eyes and ears” doesn’tnecessarily mean a physical pres-ence; rather, it means partnershipsand arrangements with those whoare “on the ground” at the poles of cultural excellence.
Infrastructure Trends
The primary challenge in W1 is tomaintain and repair infrastructures.This is often a politically unpopularor unsexy topic, so it suffers from ne-
of Civil Engineers estimated that thecost of repairing U.S. infrastructurewould equal $1.6 trillion over thenext five years. In W2 and W3, how-ever, the primary challenge is build-
ventures stumble due to the lack of
-ists, they called that market by a dif-ferent name.Today, “writer’s rooms” across thecountry in cities like New York, Chi-cago, and Boston do a brisk businessin selling little more than a quiet
-vate spas market themselves notonly as spa-service providers, but asplaces cut off from the rest of theworld.Of course, this may ultimatelyprove to be a generational issue, asthe emerging Gen Y is not only morecomfortable with around-the-clockconnectivity, but demands it.
Trend 3: Cultural flow.
-tural multipolarity to media spread,and the result is cultural flow. In thecoming years, expect to see newideas, including products and ser-vices, coming from practically every
-tor may be the growing numbers of teens and young adults who think of themselves as global or planetary cit-izens. With so many communicationsoptions open to Gen Y, youths of to-day are making online friendsaround the world.
this to be true when we conducted a
-esting quote from one of the five
-viewed, who said: “I’ve never metmy best friend.” That is, the youngGen Yer had never met face-to-facewith the person he has been commu-nicating with for years by e-mail.
Gen Yers surveyed made no distinc-tion between online friends and the
they reported that they do not seetechnology as a replacement for face-to-face contact, they certainly see theInternet as means to access a greaterrange of friends and ideas. We areconfident that, as these youth moveinto the workforce, they will acceler-ate the rate of cultural flow throughhaving been immersed in differentcultures from a much younger age.
Business implications:
The flowswill not just be from W1 to W2 and
The network is spreading — and not just in W1, but everywhere. Global broadband sub-scribers totaled 235 million by December 2007, an increase of 17.5% from 200 millionsubscribers in December 2006.
LUISMMOLINA / ISTOCKPHOTO.COM
20
THE FUTURIST
September-October 2008
www.wfs.org
Add a Comment