6 Million Years ago
Millennium Man, Kenya
1.8 Million Years ago
Homo Erectus.
200,000 Years ago
Homo Sapiens.
3500 BCE
Sumer and Elam: pictographic writing.
3000 BCE
Egypt develops hieroglyphic writing.
1400 BCE
Oldest record of writing in China, on bones and tortoise shells.
400 BCE
First illustrated manuscripts.
400 CE
Writing systems, vocabulary, spread from India to Southeast Asia.
615 CE
First records of the teachings of Mohammed.
1116
Chinese make stitched books.
1150
Koreans print books from movable type.
1309
Paper is made in England.
1423
Europeans use xylography (block printing) to produce books.
1440
Possible date of Johnannes Gutenberg’s first printing effort.
1565
The graphite pencil.
1604
Work begins on the King James version of the Bible.
1657
Camera obscuras shrink from room size, can be carried under one arm.
1780
Steel pen points begin to replace quill feathers
1839
Cameras manufactured for sale, the Giroux Daguerreotype.
1861
Kinematoscope by U.S. inventor Coleman Sellers, world’s first movie projector.
1867
Christopher Sholes of Wisconsin builds a Type-Writer.
1876
“Mr. Watson, come here. I want you.” Bell invents the telephone.
1888
The Kodak box camera, $25, takes 100 pictures on a roll
1895
Women hysterical—psychoanalyzed by Freud.
1898
Lumière boasts a catalogue of more than one thousand short films.
1900
U.S. has 2,150 daily newspapers, 478 tri- or semi-weeklies, 14,717 weeklies. 562 cities in U.S. have more than one daily newspaper; New York City has 29.
1904
The comic book.
1910
Cinemas on street corners across America.
1915
Radio-telephone carries voice from Virginia to the Eiffel Tower, Paris.
1920-1950
Mass Magazines w/ Glossy Photos.
1938
More than 80 million movie tickets (65% of population) sold in U.S. each week.
1954
54% of American homes have television sets.
1960
Digital Equipment introduces the first minicomputer in 1960, the PDP-1, for US$120,000. It was the first commercial computer equipped with a keyboard and monitor.
1962
Marshall McLuhan’s The Gutenberg Galaxy sees limits for the print media.
1963
81 million telephones in the United States, 159 million worldwide.
1964
IBM’s OS/360 is first mass-produced computer operating system.
1971
ARPANET, forerunner of the internet, has 22 university and government connections.
1977
Toy company Mattel manufactures hand-held LED video games.
1983
Apple's Lisa, the first microcomputer with a graphical user interface.
1988
98% of U.S. homes have at least one television set.
1991
Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) helps create the World Wide Web.
1993
Nokia sends text messages between mobile phones.
1995
30 million Internet users worldwide.
1997
Palm produces the first handheld device with the Palm OS. 43% of U.S. homes have computers.
1999
Video games earn more money than movies.Ten million Web servers throughout the world.
2000
100 million cell phone subscribers in US. 70 million computers connected to the Internet.
2004
1.5 billion cell phones worldwide.
2006
Estimated total hits to blogs each day: 30 million. Americans watch 4 hrs 35 min of TV daily, a record.
2007
Of video game players, more are adult women (30%) than boys under 18 (23%).
2007
Sony’s 11-inch OLED TV screen is thinner than a dime.
2008
IBM supercomputer breaks petaflop:
1 quadrillion calculations/sec.
2009
iPhone acquires more than 10,000 apps, over 1 billion downloads.
We are monitoring trends that are spanning longer periods of time than many other trend watchers typically consider: the last 5000 years since the arrival of the alphabet; the last 170 years since the Giroux Daguerreotype Camera went on sale in Paris in 1839; the last 60 years since the widespread adoption of television; and, yes, the last few years since the iPhone was introduced in the United States on June 29, 2007. However, rather than making our trend analysis less relevant, clients will find our depth even more useful to illuminate current behaviors and present-day cultural dynamics.
We are exploring these trends from a Metalife perspective: how are we changing as we inter/adapt with a welter of new and evolving communication tools? From the larger context of our longer time frame, we are able to help corporations, hospital complexes, school systems, churches and others understand the massive change that we are experiencing today.
In this way, understanding Metalife trends helps these organizations to put change into a timely and useful perspective that is both challenging and empowering.
Information pinballing changes how we think.
As information moves through and around us at ever faster speeds,
the effects of that acceleration are numerous and contradictory.
While we ‘pinball’ from one information venue to another, both consciously and accidentally via ambient findability, pinballing engenders a
thinking which leads to alphabetic compression (i.e., Twitter) which then breeds the rise of digital acronyms and, among cultural (thumb) tribes, shibboleths replace speech. Does it also lead to accidental connections? If so, how can we exploit that connective potential? Further, as there is less ‘anchoring’ to one format or venue, more roaming and grazing, how does this affect our focus? Are we becoming willing de-focusers?
The 'bounce' challenges and changes info storage.
For centuries we equated knowing with storing our knowledge. With more information inputs from more sources and via more tools, many of us are experiencing an ‘attention crash.’ There are more information inputs than we can pay attention to. Likewise, there is more information than we can store in our personal memory. What are the effects of these seemingly endless inputs on our alphabetic tradition of using our brains as storage cabinets?
Will we soon port our memory; move all our mnemonic skills to a removable flash memory card format? (Think memorization in school, knowing dates in history, mathematical formulae and computations, etc.) In the age of stream access and cloud computing, how much does individual storage matter? Will access completely replace the demand for storage in work settings and school systems? How does this affect curricula, testing, even physical layouts of classrooms? Is storage an idea whose time has come and gone?
Page to stream: information boundaries are morphing.
Moving from the boundaries of paragraphs and pages to the fast-moving info stream—as Stowe Boyd has said –we are moving to ‘a more dynamic and fast form of conversation.’ As we enter this ‘sprawling web of connections each receiving and sending signals,’ (more Boyd), we’re entering André Malraux’s “museum without walls”. When boundaries change, everything changes. The page boundaries we put around our information in centuries of books, magazines, newspapers have evolved in the online environment; but they are changing and likely will morph into unique environments that operate ‘without walls’. Will this change how we find meaning in that information? Further, what new navigational techniques are either emerging or are about to emerge as a result of morphing information boundaries? What will we see differently with changed boundaries and how will we see it?
Cell phones drive driving.
Why are we hung up on driving tool drunk? Dr. John Medina, author of Brain Rules, says: “Driving while talking on a cell phone is like driving drunk. The brain is a sequential processor and large fractions of a second are consumed every time the brain switches tasks. This is why cell-phone talkers are a half-second slower to hit the brakes and get in more wrecks.” Research indicates most drivers are aware that it is not safe to drive while talking on a cell phone, yet they still do it. Are we drunk on the communication tool, unable to put it down because—as we do with all our tools—we incorporate it into the body? Is this behavior related to sexting (research also indicates teenagers are aware of potential dangers) in the sense that with this tool in our hands our brains conform more to the tool than our intentions?
Social surrogacy: With friends like these, who needs friends?
As kids, many of us had imaginary friends. Today as adults, many people have more (and ostensibly better) parasocial relationships with people on reality TV shows and weekly drama series than with people in so-called real life. With the rise of MMORPGs such as Second Life, Habo or WOW, how real is a ‘real’ friend? Does the person have to look like
and be who they say they are? Pundits are already asking questions like, “Do Facebook friends provide the same support as those in real life?” Scientists are wondering whether RL loneliness can be ‘cured’ by reality TV? What sorts of connections and interactions are we making with these social surrogates, and what are the long term effects of watching and talking to people who aren’t in the same world we used to think of as real? Food for thought: In real life, the cognitive neuroscientists at the Swedish medical university Karolinska Institutet succeeded in making subjects perceive the bodies of mannequins and other people as their own. The illusion also worked even when the two people differed in appearance or were of different sexes. It also worked whether the subject was immobile or was making voluntary movements.
First work, now church: freelancing rocks.
As the freelance labor pool has widened across corporate America due to restructuring and economic dislocation, why has America also concurrently become ‘a nation of religious freelancers’? So many Americans claim no religion at all (15%, up from 8% in 1990), that this category now outranks every other major U.S. religious group except Catholics and Baptists. The co-author of a recent survey (ARIS) concludes: "More than ever before, people are just
making up their own stories of who they are. They say, 'I'm everything. I'm nothing. I believe in myself.'" Is this further evidence that as our communication tools that bring us the world change, we change our stories and then revalue how and what we see in the world? As we move from the Alphabetic Order to the Visual Carnival are the stories that built the great world religions losing their hold on our hearts and imaginations?
Hooking up dates dating.
Today, with increasing frequency, before getting to know someone in person (in the flesh), teens and others profile them online. (87% of youth ages 12-17 engage at least occasionally in some form of electronic personal communication; younger online adults are much more likely than their older counterparts to use social networks, with 75% of adults 18-24 using these networks.) The Metalife Project is comprised of a number of people in this age cohort. We are asking, since the use of online social networks is a widespread phenomenon of the young, how much does online profiling change the process of getting to know someone? Does information speed change the speed and duration of relationships? Will this have wider ramifications on marriage, family building, even home buying?
Brands as holograms.
Brands began as badges and flags, evolved to become names and logos, signaling a given product by color, typeface, and other design elements. With the arrival of color magazines and television, brands personified, first with cartoon characters (i.e., the Ipana beaver) and then with human impersonations (i.e., the Marlboro Man). With the advent of immersive technologies, brands have moved from single-point references like logos and characters to immersive, full-sensory experiences (i.e., an Apple store).
In short, brands are becoming holograms: “Since each point in the hologram contains light from the whole of the original scene, the whole scene can, in principle, be reconstructed from an arbitrarily small part of the hologram.” [Wikipedia]. It is no longer enough for Whole Foods to sell us fresh, organic vegetables; we want the experience to be as good as the food, the CEO as politically correct as we are. How will brands continue to keep up with raised expectations: when we see the can or box, will we expect to see the whole (hologram) of the company? How will brands show up in virtual venues like blogs, websites and virtual worlds? Can we now consider brands as conversations? Brands as product placements in the 360/24/7 life movie? Brands as continuous transparent access to our needs and desires? If being outside the conversation doesn’t work anymore, can we say either you’re inside the conversation or you’re ignored?
Photo Credits and Links
Metalife Trends Images:
1. Information pinballing changes how we think — Idea Champions.com
2. The 'bounce' challenges and changes info storage — Aliquots.com
3. Information boundaries are morphing — Courtesy Gadl’s Recursion Set at, Flickr.com
4. Cell phones drive driving — Dialphone.co.uk
5. Social surrogacy: With friends like these, who needs friends? Baptizedbyfire.com
6. The new church is a bookstore. — DesignTopNews.com
7. Hooking up dates dating. — Lovesites.com
8. Brands as holograms. — Photobucket.com
Sidebar Timeline:
This timeline is adapted from the University of Minnesota Media History Project
Hieroglyphic writing — Idstyle.com
Writing on tortoise shell — Cultural-china.com
Illustrated manuscripts — Colostate.edu
Koreans print books — Rightreading.com
Xylography block printing — PrivateLibraryTypepad.com
Giroux Daguerreotype — GEH.org
1876 Bell Telephone — sparkmuseum.com
Kodak box camera — KClibrary.lonestar.edu
Comic book — Wikimedia.org
Photoplay — Bdbphotos.com
1954 Television — Wired.com
IBM OS/360 — Maximumpc.com
Mattel hand-held video game — Handheldmuseum.com
Nokia phone — Regmedia.co.uk
CYBER Magazine: Concept and execution by Alyssa Good
1997 Palm OS — I.Zdnet.com
Kids watching TV — Shepherdgrds.com
iPhone — Macblogz.com
