• by Donnovan Andrews , June 10, 2013

The writer Dan Hamman says: “Permanence is the illusion of every age.” How true, even in our business, which is founded on creative destruction. Companies constantly tear down what is seen as outmoded and establish replacements cast as innovative or state-of-the art.

But inherent in that process is the preparation for the time when the replacement will itself be made obsolete. We work to wipe out what we do. This is the natural process of business-building in the digital age. 

I wanted to start this column because of what I’m seeing around me in the news, in the advertising industry, in the changing reflections of our mass culture through our national political life. We are in the build-up to some changes that are going to happen very fast — and their net result will be a kind of global society we have never seen before. I hope to track developing trends so we can guess where they will end up, and how they will create the future.

The facets of our technological development and its impacts on our social, political and personal landscapes are a series of lenses through which we view aspects of our common future. At this point, everybody knows the media revolution that has taken place over the last decade has not yet settled into a new status quo. Perhaps it never will, given our culture's distinction, diversity and independence. 

Our planetary ecology is at a tipping point; competition for resources could unleash political chaos in the developing world and climatic chaos on our doorstep. This will influence how we purchase, and how things are manufactured.

We see family differently, making new families of our friends close and (physically) far. This will change how we are influenced, opening our world as we grow and respond to it. Racial and cultural identities are starting to blur and more of us are checking the box marked ‘Other,’ leaving demographers scrambling to create new models.  

We have a president whose very existence is history-making and one-sixth of our population has strong ties with another continent and language. Media catches the image we project of ourselves, its confidence or fear, its openness or strife, its progress or retrogression. It  is the place where we can see all these transformations happening. 

We buy online, in the long tail of individual choice and discernment. We connect across webs of local association, jump countries and continents, and instantly join forces with critical masses to advance an agenda we feel to be the right and responsible course for our communities and world. We concentrate in cities, reinvent suburbs and shop green from co-ops and local farmers, or barter goods and services in unofficial, untaxed microeconomies.

When we overlay these observational lenses of consumerism, technology adoption, product development and demographic shifts, we begin to see how human behavior, influenced by seemingly disparate and unrelated spheres of activity, will lead to industry-changing trends that will affect the media, technology and the world as we know it.

I will contribute a column on various topics in a biweekly format. Please join in on the conversations to rethink our world.