The rise (and fast fall) of digital culture

Hard to know what to highlight today. The woman who fell off a cliff whilst texting and trying to light a cigarette at the same time is tempting. More over taxing than multi-tasking. Apparently the women lived but a few more feet and she might have been a candidate for the Darwin Awards. Thanks Lynda for sending me this delicious digital gem. However, I feel peoples’ attention should go instead to Mary Meeker’s overview of key internet trends for 2012, which, essentially, says almost every conceivable human activity is in the process of being transformed.

 

Anxiety and mental disorder

 

I was talking to a Chinese Banker last night and had an interesting discussion about the explosion of mental health problems in China caused, potentially, by rapid social and technological change mixed with urbanisation. This chimes with a comment made by a police chief constable in the UK who said to me recently that his force (in the north of England) was increasingly dealing with the fallout from mental health issues. Over in the US, according to the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, between 2% and 4% of Americans suffered from an anxiety disorder in 1980. A  1994 study raised this to 15% while a 2009 study raised this figure to 49.5%

And this just in from a regular reader (thanks as always!)

I would suggest ‘Secular Millenarianism’ as something to watch out for. As technology advances faster than we can understand it, the anxiety this generates will only increase. It seems to me that millenarianism has impacts for all the things on your provisional list*, and the media plays its part in provoking this ‘end is nigh’ perspective, which has already infested many of our secular institutions.

“Fear prophets, Adso, and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them.”
(Umberto Eco: The Name of the Rose)

* This refers to the list of forces on my previous post below (26 September).

The world in 2045

Here’s a serendipitous update. I’ve been spending the last couple of days thinking about 2025 and 2030 so what arrives in my inbox this morning but an update on the Global Strategic Trends Programme looking at the world in 2045. To answer a previous comment about when this work (the 2045 report) will be available the answer is April 2014. As for themes I’ll drip various things in over the coming months but some of the top themes currently are as follows:

Role of the state
Globalisation
Inequality
Technology advances
Human identity
Ideology
Lifestyle
Resources & climate

So in the spirit of open innovation and the wisdom of crowds, what’s missing from this list in terms of meta themes or drivers of change?

The World in 2025 (and 2030)

Sorry, I’ve been doing my finest impression of a headless chicken running around for the past few days. Monday was a workshop with a large travel company looking at what the world might look like in 2025. Today it was a big charity looking at the world in 2030 and the possible strategic implications thereof.

Did anything odd happen? Not really. With the charity societal values came up strongly as you might expect, along with digital communications accelerating protest and social change, the end of retirement (again), impacts of near universal mobile access to the Internet, mass migration, water, radical (extremist) religion and ‘crash of the cloud.’

With travel it was a bit more focused on things like energy, as you’d expect, although demographics was a fertile area for discussion.

What is really useful is that the future focus workshop process has now been done enough times to create a fantastic ideas bank of what other companies and organisations in other sectors and geographies feel are important areas of concern.

Talk of the week (and Norman no friends)

Yikes, what has happened? The feed burner usually has around 1,000 subscribers (1042 yesterday). Today it’s none. Was my last post really that upsetting or do we have a ghost or a hacker in the machine?

How about a good talk to go to if you are in or around London this weekend? Something that looks rather good is a talk by the architect Will Alsop at the School of Life on Sunday 11.30-1.00pm. The talk is Will Alsop on boredom and will cover why empty time is such a good thing, especially for creativity. Right up my street.

School of Life, 70 Marchmont Street, London WC1.

Our Contact-less Culture

 

 

 

 

 

 

In London one of the latest things you can do is attend a cuddle workshop, where people wander around a cushion lined studio spooning total strangers. Apparently the idea is to rediscover non-sexual touch and affection.

These parties, which started in the US and have also appeared in Australia, are clearly a fad, and I’m sure they attract more than their fair share of Harry Potter-reading, pyjama-wearing weirdos, but they’re also perhaps an early indication of the fact that an increasing number of people, many of whom now live alone, crave the sensation of being physically held and touched.

Like many fringe ideas, it may also represent an unmet need – in this case a remedy for sadness or loneliness. In Japan, for example, the latest fad is a cat cafe where people wander around a room littered with free-roaming cats whilst sipping a latte. These Cuddle Parties and cat cafes represent a safe form of intimacy-on-demand that appeals to singles and married couples alike, many of whom are either too busy or tired to become involved with any other form of shared physical activity.

On one level this craving for instant intimacy is ironic because in many other areas we are being told to accept as “normal” behaviour that is exactly the opposite. Physically touching a colleague at work (and I’m talking here about affectionate hugs) is now strictly verboten.

Research by Manchester Metropolitan University also says there is a growing anxiety in childcare circles about touching children. Recent panics include a male teacher who instructed a small child to apply a plaster himself because the teacher was too afraid to touch the child. This is clearly insane but the madness isn’t restricted to loony politicians and pediatricians.

Organisations are also trying to convince us that reducing human contact is a good thing because it saves us time and money. It’s the new economy dude. Society 2.0. They are liars. Reducing human contact saves them time and money.

It’s the same with social networking sites. People have an average of 150 friends on Facebook. But these are digital acquaintances. These are superficial friends and we are confusing familiarity with intimacy. Hence our growing need for physical contact. Even the environment has been roped in to help sell us the lie that less human contact is healthy. But even if these e-vangelicals are right they are still wrong. For instance, sociologists at the University of Arizona and Duke University North Carolina have found that Americans have fewer real friends than they used to.

In 1985, the average American had three people to talk to about their problems. Now the figure is just two. The results of this study have been disputed, but the fact remains that we are drifting away from physical contact and communication.

Longer working hours are one reason for this, but the real culprit is technology. Use of the internet and mobile phones has reduced face-to-face contact. People need to intimately connect with other people.

If they don’t, there is a danger that they will spend too much time inhabiting virtual worlds like Second Life. This is not good for them and is not good for the planet either. People need people because happiness comes from intimate interactions with friends and family.

Moreover, as everyone instinctively knows, new ideas are born serendipitously in places like stairwells and over lunch, not at overly orchestrated brainstorms or government summits where most of the solutions are so small that they could be mistaken for homeopathic remedies.

We need to establish an intimate relationship with the thought that a life lived remotely, or at a physical distance from others, is ultimately unbearable. Time, in other words, for a physical revolution.

Battery-Reared Children

According to a recent news story, 25% of them have difficulty walking and many of them are becoming disabled by rapid weight gain and a lack of proper sleep. The story in question is about battery-farmed chickens, but it could equally be about our children.

In the UK, 25% of children between the ages of eight and ten years old have never played outside unsupervised. Meanwhile, Australia is in the middle of an allergy epidemic. According to the government, 40% of Australian children suffer from an allergy of one kind or another. Holy guacamole.

One reason for this is probably because our houses have become too clean and our kids are not exposed to enough dirt. Filth yes, there’s plenty of that on the various screens we allow them to sit in front of, but kids (and chickens) need to scratch around outside. But I don’t think blaming technology is fair. The real culprit here is parental paranoia. We have become afraid of life itself. For example, back in 2003 there were less than 200 non-food anti-bacterial products launched onto supermarkets shelves worldwide. By 2006, this had jumped to 1,610.

And it’s not just microbes we’re trying to ban. Many schools now have a strict policy relating to food allergies. Bags are searched every morning to identify illegal foodstuffs, which can include yoghurt, homemade cakes and, of course, anything that has ever come into contact with – or might have once said hello to – a nut. Nuts? I’d say so. But we are putting fear in front of fact.

The food allergy epidemic is largely a myth. According to the US Food Allergy & Anaphylaxis Network (FANN) around 150-200 people die each year in America due to allergic reactions to food. But according to the US Centre for Disease Control the actual figure is closer to 10. That’s a big difference. And let’s put this into perspective. Around 40,000 people are killed every year on American roads, including more than 2,500 kids. I suspect the ratios would be similar in other countries.

Don’t get me wrong here. Food allergies are real and  do kill. A few years ago a fourteen-year-old Melbourne boy died whilst on camp due to a food allergy. However, exaggerating the risk could be doing more harm than good because it feeds a culture of fear where children are overwhelmed by anxiety. Moreover, nothing can ever be 100% safe and squeezing the risk out of one area only displaces it somewhere else. Risk will not disappear simply because you regulate it.

I think we are creating a false sense of security and learned helplessness in other areas too. In some schools, running in the playground has been banned because children might bump into each other or fall over. Some schools have even gone so far as to introduce soft, impact-absorbing surfaces to replace old-fashioned dirt or tarmac.

The same thinking has resulted in games such as conkers and even skipping being banned on health and safety grounds. Perhaps this is working – when was the last time you saw a kid with grazed knees or a broken arm? These kids exist but they are an endangered species. This is a shame because these accidents actually have a benefit. They teach kids to push the boundaries, but to be careful. They also teach resilience. Moreover, according to some experts, these surfaces may actually cause more serious accidents because children believe that they are safe.

Our protectionist and interventionist impulse may be harming us in other areas too. For instance, schools are now asking parent helpers to supply personal information that will be used to conduct criminal background checks. Good idea? Possibly, but the implication is that all adults are guilty until proven innocent. The plan could also backfire in a number of ways.

First, the checks could result in less parent helpers. Fancy coaching football at the weekend? Well how would you feel about it if it meant ongoing criminal checks?

The argument in favour of checks is that if you are innocent you have nothing to worry about. But what worries me is that once we start to view all adults as potential sex offenders there will be subtle changes to how everything from policing to law making operates. Did you know, for example, that unaccompanied children on BA flights can sit alongside women, but not alongside men. All men, it seems, are now suspect.

Second, spontaneous acts of random kindness could disappear under a mountain of bureaucratic red tape. Fancy baking a cake for the school raffle? You can’t. The cake may have come into contact with nuts and we can’t tell whether you’re a nutcase until you fill out a form.

To be civil means to be polite or courteous and civilisation is built upon the idea of mutual trust, which has started to evaporate. But most people are still trustworthy and most things are not dangerous, but if we teach our children that they are not we are laying the foundations for a society where fear becomes an epidemic.

Back into the swing

Where to start? A number that recently jumped out for me was that a charity called the Child Poverty Action Group in the UK spent £1,551,000 of its income of £1,990,000 on wages (Daily Telegraph). So the primary activity of this non-profit is its own existence?

Also spotted was a piece saying that almost 50% of parents impose a gadget-free days on their children each week and another from last month about expensive electronic gadgets displacing low-cost and free outdoor play.

However, my favourite article over the past days has been a post on the Fast Company website about the benefits of silence – or at least why some of the quietest people at work can be the most productive.

I’m now off. I’m going to listen to the album Grace by Jeff Buckey and seeing which combinations of words come out of my fingertips…

(PS Thanks Orkneylad).

 

 

Zero distractions

Funny. I’ve just been in hospital for the day. Seems it’s a false alarm, or at least not what I thought it was. This is slightly annoying on one trivial level, because I’ve spent the last month spending like there’s no tomorrow on the warped basis that there may be no tomorrow. I’ll now have to get used to £10 bottles of wine again. What a difference a zero can make. Add a few more zeros and you could write a good film script about someone that spent borrowed money on a similar basis and then had to make it all back again – fast.

On a more serious note I now agree with someone who said that it should be compulsory for all adults to spend 24-hours in a public hospital, especially A&E. It gives you a perspective that’s rarely available elsewhere. You could see this today. People came into the ward in the morning and by the afternoon their lives had totally changed. What they thought they were – and were going to be – had totally changed in the space of a few hours. I don’t think that anyone could take selling something like tinned soup seriously after something like that. You’d surely have to do something more meaningful.

I also liked the sense of equality. Also the fact that the exposure of human flesh to others somehow bared your soul as well. There was a strange connectedness with strangers. A conviviality that’s somehow often lacking elsewhere. Maybe we all need to get semi-naked more often.

One thing I did manage to do during my blissful, but occasionally tense, six hours in distraction-free limbo-land was finish off Future Babble. This is really a rather good book, especially if you are involved with any kind of long-term forecasting or planning. I especially liked this quote from Alistair Cooke, from the 1970s I’d guess: “In the best of times our days are numbered anyway… and so it would be a crime against nature for any generation to take the world’s crisis so solemnly that it put off enjoying those things for which we were designed in the first place. The opportunity to do good work, to fall in love, to enjoy friends, to hit a ball, and to bounce a baby.” Amen to that.

A runaway milk tanker may hit me tomorrow, but, if not, things should vaguely start to getting back to normal. I’m also fired up about writing something of real substance for a change. I doubt that this will be the blog, although given enough time you never know. It could be What’s Next, but I feel a new book is coming on. The result, of course, be junk, but I’m getting a feeling about something that’s widely felt but rarely said.