Now Trending (or Not)

Great article in this month's Wired Magazine about "How to Spot the Future."  Not sure I have futurist skills, since my annual predictions post has been laughably off every single year (bonus points for consistently being wrong?).  But nevertheless it's a fun thing to dabble in.  And what's a blog for if you can't riff on something off the top of your head and see if it goes somewhere?  (Now that's an uncharacteristic statement coming from an introvert.)  To wit, some random musings on what's trending out there in the tiny piece of the world I touch:

(1) Shorter news cycle + more choices + slow death of the print publishing industry = mainstream mags will do anything for attention, like label Barack Obama "the first gay president" or feature a woman breastfeeding her three-year-old = it's going to get even more shocking and sensational from here on out.

(2) Influence is everything + everything needs to be measured = Klout picking up momentum as the "it" site for boiling everyone down to one score for social media power.  (I've had 10 friends join it in the last 60 days.  For me, this qualifies as a deluge.)

(3) Five years from now, no one will be speaking of Instagram, and yet the $1 billion Facebook paid for it will seem ridiculously cheap; photos are "the" mobile app, to the point that there will be no such thing as a distinct photo app, and young'uns will look quizzically when we tell them there used to be such a thing.

(4) Since we love our mash-ups so much (for example, I may be the only person in America who didn't see The Avengers earlier this month), why aren't there reality shows, computer sims, or college courses that catalyze new ones?  I predict these are going to start sprouting up. 

(5) If the 2022 equivalents of Andrew Luck and Robert Griffin III (i.e. uber-studs with the whole package: brawn, athleticism, and smarts) are being dissuaded by their parents from playing football because of the risk of head injury, where will they end up?  There's no analog to the alpha dog status of the varsity quarterback, whether in the high school pecking order or in professional sports.  Whatever is closest in both worlds is about to become much more prominent in the years and decades to come.