Micro-futures
How to videos
With the internet, so many more things have become accessible to the general public and we’re able to learn so much more. I think that the number of “how to” videos that exist is really interesting because of the way it kind of allows us to learn things on our own.
These videos make me think about what kind of expectations we might have for each other in regards to how much we know and how much we’ve spent our personal time learning what might be considered “common knowledge.”
As shown in the image above, girls can now learn how to do make-up from online tutorials. One might think that girls would learn how to do make-up from their moms, but make-up styles have trends and many different styles, so it makes sense to learn from someone on the internet who wears make-up in one’s desired style.
So really what I’m trying to say is that I wonder how much knowledge each generation would have–we definitely know different things, and another amount of things in certain areas, compared to the generation before us. A lot of the education that we receive is still through teachers and professors, but how long is that going to last? When is technology going to be used more in the classroom? Are we maybe going to learn from people through technology?
Social media/reality stars
Social media and reality tv stars wouldn’t exist without the internet because of its accessibility and its ability to spread things quickly. Thanks to social media platforms, countless amounts of people have become famous more quickly. With the help of tabloids and other gossip type magazines, stars have gained more publicity, but the internet has changed the game. The rise of many celebrities in this generation have actually come from the internet–many of them come from Youtube (vloggers, make-up demonstrators, etc).
So what would the future look like when we already have so many people who are trying to get famous and are already famous? Is there going to be another form of media that would enable people to become famous? And how will we define fame? Today, it seems like many people want to be known even if it’s just by a few people and many of them achieve that level of fame. So how ‘famous’ would people get in the future?
There are a few companies that have greatly impacted the way our generation works and how we communicate and one of those companies is Google. Many people of our generation use Google as a search engine, cloud storage, email service, map service, calendar service, writing, presenting, and organizing service, and so many more. Google has acquired a numerous amount of companies to create more services, steering more people to rely on and use Google. Here’s a list of services that Google provides:
With the way we use large service providers like Google or Apple, what will the future look like? How will our behaviors change? How will these larger companies affect the United States’ economy? Small businesses have been the backbone of the U.S. economy for many years so how will they get affected by the increase in our reliance on these services?
