It's time to take a look, a look into the future...

The future, Sarah? 


In spite of Caincross's 30-year divide from our current time, he was incredibly perceptive about the state of technology and where the landscape was taking society. Now that we've seen the result of his predictions, let me take a crack at "trendspotting" for our next 30 years.

Social Media will be like the cell phone, it's going to continue to change and evolve rapidly and conform to its users. Although Facebook has been very successful at obtaining a huge membership for a consistent period of time, a study in Business Insider indicated stagnation in growth, with a possibility of decline. Social Media is all about youth, and todays youngest users are not using just one platform, but many. Social Media brands, like Ford and Chevy of its time, entertained prominence for awhile because of the infancy of the market, but now that its growing, we'll see new players on an annual, or even more frequent, basis, and "what's hot" constantly being in a state of flux, just like the App market.

In terms of Entertainment, all markets are in the process of undergoing a huge shift from traditional modes to new streaming. Eventually, I foresee a merging of the film and television industries; there will no longer be a separation for "large" and "small" screen productions. Everything will be streamed online through various services that will lobby production companies for streaming rights, and customers will have to pay for each separately. The movie theater industry will completely collapse and reformat itself into "special event" houses where customers will choose to see a product on the big screen such as big-special effects productions, but will be simultaneously released on streaming. The streaming system will subsidized revenues for high-production motion pictures and allow the cost of special event movie theater pricing to come down.

It's clear that technology is transforming the world we live in on a consistent basis. The future holds a lot of questions, but evolving trends can be identified just as Caincross was able to.