Institute For The Future

FUTURE NOW - When Everything is Media

During this 50th Anniversary year for IFTF, we look ahead to the next decade, we are on the verge of a new set of technological advances that will transform when, where, how and why we communicate. The rapid deployment of the Internet of Things, advances in network speed, and emerging immersive media platforms are transforming our communications experiences.

This marks the first in a series of posts from the 2016 issue of our FUTURE NOW magazine, "When Everything Is Media," illuminating elements of the information-rich ambient communications environment that will extend beyond our phones, televisions and computers to encompass our bodies, objects, environments and living things. If the last decade was marked by a laser focus on mobile and social technologies, our next decade will usher in a world of ambient communications that will challenge us to radically rethink our communications strategies for an increasingly rich, divergent set of digital media.

But even as these almost-magical tools stretch our perceptions of what is possible, we will use them for familiar reasons. To unlock the value of these emerging technological capacities, we need to understand how to connect them to long-standing human intentions.

In this issue of Institute for the Future’s Future Now magazine, we explore how new technological capacities will intersect with age-old intentions of communication through a series of scenarios, articles, interviews and other provocations. Collectively, they explore issues like how powerful new technologies of surveillance can be used for everything from making games more fun to exerting control over activists to maintaining intimate relationships between family members. Moving forward, we will take an in-depth look at how sensors, artificial intelligence, blockchain, and blended reality tech will transform how we collaborate, allowing massive crowds to work together in emergent ways, and even allowing us to partner with animals and digital entities in new ways.