Future Now
The IFTF Blog
Executive Director Marina Gorbis on IFC Media Project
Marina on IFC from Institute for the Future on Vimeo.
IFTF's Executive Director Marina Gorbis was recently featured on an IFC Media Project special about the future of the news. Current TV's Robin Sloan, a friend of IFTF, and Michael Rogers of the New York Times joined her in the episode. In her remarks, Marina had the opportunity to tie the future of journalism to the Tech Horizons team's Blended Reality research by highlighting one of the key themes from our work: I Am the Star of My Own Show. Here's a short selection from that theme's chapter in the report:
Forty years ago, Andy Warhol uttered the now famous phrase: “In the future everyone will be world famous for 15 minutes.” The future is here, but our world fame is no longer measured in minutes. In the words of artist and designer Paul Phillips, “everyone will be world famous for 15 megabytes.” Each one of us is becoming a one-person media channel—the stars of our own shows.
Technology enables this transformation. In the not so distant past it took an army of people to produce a show. You needed expensive equipment, expensive actors, skilled camera operators, producers, and an army of stagehands, agents, promoters, and multitudes of others. Even today, heavily produced TV shows still require a lot of people, money, and equipment. However, this is no longer the only game in town. As the cost of video production rapidly decreases a whole array of accessible and affordable lightweight, non-professional tools are emerging. These include inexpensive video cameras, such as Flip Mino, which sells for about $180USD; cell phones with built-in cameras and ever-improving video capabilities; laptops with cameras and microphones; and programs such as Qik that enable video streaming via cell phones. These tools are getting into the hands of people without professional training who are using them to create their own shows.
Thus, what was exclusively the province of experts and production studios is now open to everyone, enabling an evolution of a whole new repertoire of personal performance genres. The following are just some emerging personal performance genres we uncovered in our ethnographic interviews.
The report we created from that research will be available to all Technology Horizons members in the upcoming weeks. We're excited to share it!
The video at the top of this post is just a short clip from the IFC special, but if you have the opportunity to see the rest of it you'll hear Michael Rogers talk about future goggles that act as personalized information filters. This idea is something IFTF first presented with our glasses video, created by Jason Tester and Mike Love, and is something we recently revisited in one of our Blended Reality digital stories, "The World As I Choose To See It," embedded below.
Blended Reality Digital Story: The World As I Choose to See It from Institute for the Future on Vimeo.