Fiction is boring
What do futurists read?Aside, of course, from this sterling blog, and others of its ilk, you might wonder what the futurist's literary diet looks like. HRCFS director Jim Dator was interviewed for a brief, but revealing, profile of his reading habits in the Honolulu Advertiser last Sunday.
In response to a question about the fate of the written word, he said, "writing will remain but it will not dominate in the ways it does at the present time, I suspect. But, I don't really know the future."
Pah! What kind of futurist admits to not really knowing the future? Surely what the world needs now is big, confident, hyperbolic predictions grounded mainly in wishful thinking and egotism.
issue of THE FUTURIST magazine.
Futurists Question if the Written Word Will Survive the Next 50 Years.
Bethesda, MD: Newspapers are losing readers as quickly as media companies are recasting themselves as multimedia outlets. People in the developed world are spending less time reading books and more time interacting with visual mediatelevision, Podcasts and video gamesthan ever before. The proportion of 17-year-olds who read for enjoyment "almost every day" fell from 31% to 22% between the years 1984 and 2004.
Meanwhile, television watching continues to rise about 3% year after year, and almost 87% of kids aged 8 to 17 now have a video game player in their home.
What do these trends mean for the art of the word and the role of text in the twenty-first century? For insight into this issue, THE FUTURIST magazine went to Michael Rogers, futurist in residence for the New York Times Company and columnist for MSNBC.com, as well as Megatrends author John Naisbitt, techno-futurist William Crossman, New Atlantis editor Christine Rosen, military strategist Edward N. Luttwak, and Peter Wagschal, author of a prescient 1978 FUTURIST article, "Illiterates with Doctorates" for their take on the rise of visual culture and the future of the written word.
According to William Crossman, "by 2050, there will be no reason to require young people to learn to read and write because writing --as we know it today—will have become an obsolete technology."
This special feature is part of the March-April issue of THE FUTURIST magazine. Pick up your copy for $4.95 at bookstores and newsstands, or write the World Future Society, 7910 Woodmont Ave., Suite 450, Bethesda, MD 20814. Order online at www.wfs.org.
THE FUTURIST is a bimonthly magazine focused on innovation, creative thinking, and emerging social, economic, environmental, and technological trends.|
Among the thinkers and experts who have contributed to THE FUTURIST are Gene Roddenberry, Al Gore, Newt Gingrich, Richard Lamm, Alvin and Heidi Toffler, Buckminster Fuller, Frederik Pohl, Isaac Asimov, Vaclav Havel, Hazel Henderson, Margaret Mead, Robert McNamara, Betty Friedan, Nicholas Negroponte, Helena Norberg-Hodge, Lester R. Brown, Arthur C. Clarke, Douglas Rushkoff, Joel Garreau, and William J. Mitchell.
Editors: To request a review copy of THE FUTURIST magazine, contact director of communications Patrick Tucker 301-656-8274 ext. 116, ptucker@wfs.org. More information about the World Future Society can also be obtained from the Society’s Web site.www.wfs.org