#3usefulthings — #4— Futurology: Microtrends, nano influencers, pico..something?
#3usefulthings is a series of small blog posts with short overviews of some interesting and useful facts. Other issues: 1, 2, 3, 5, 6.
One of my favorite topics in university was futurology.
Don’t really remember how it happened (probably because of my participation in students competition in political and social sciences), but I’ve read the Future Shock by Alvin Toffler. It was so cool to read the book written in 1970 at the beginning of 2010th and realize that people actually witnessed all the types of shock he’d described (like a need to move from rural area to a city and live in capsule family instead of the big family with few generations). A couple of years later I’ve read his The Third Wave, and again I was amazed by his precise predictions.
Can’t recall if I read any other futurology books after The Third Wave, wanna try Ray Kurzweil and later books of Toffler. For now, there are a lot of wonderful online sources and constant articles called in a way “what to expect by 2020 in blah-blah sphere”. They contain the latest information, statistics, infographics, and videos.
1. Futurism. I remember the period when my morning routine started with their daily email. How can you be pessimistic about the future when there is an inspiring article about diatoms? After that article “I’m faded” song for me has only one association — with this video.
2. Microtrends book by Mark Penn. I’ve stumbled upon this book a couple of days ago when saw an article with a chapter from it. The article was a chapter from the book talking about a growing trend of marriages where the couples live in different rooms/flats/cities. It was interestingly described so I checked the content. There are a lot of strange tendencies in the modern society described — very similar to the Toffler’s predictions. But we don’t know if these trends will become global or not. So it’s interesting to read some new predictions and set a reminder for 2039th to compare reality with Microtrends.
The word “microtrend” reminded me about “Nano influencers” term. A friend of mine (a marketer) recently explained me this term: people with 1000<x<10000 followers are called in such way as their opinion is already valued and can be used in advertising campaigns.
I’m waiting for the measurements scale (micro-, nano-)to go down, let’s call something next using “pico-” prefix. For example, a “pico-blogger“ on Twitter.
3. New sexual identity terms😳. Maybe you’ve heard a “sapiosexual” term (if you like smart people) and thought it’s modern? pff, it’s almost obsolete now. You should learn some new words: “demisexual”, “aromantic” or “skoliosexual”. “Digisexuals” are the new black… or not, we’ll see ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
A story described in the “Her” film becomes more and more real. Learn the new terms from The New York Times article and think, maybe you are spending too much time with your digital assistants?
