Future Now
The IFTF Blog
Technology Horizons conference
The fall Technology Horizons conference, "Putting People at the Center," started tonight. It builds on "Zones of Instability" work we recently published, a report that's the first product of a long-term global ethnographic project.
The conference kicked off with a talk by author Douglas Rushkoff. As anyone who's seen him can testify, Rushkoff's performances are hard to summarize, but the essential argument is this. The era of outsourcing your manufacturing, and relying on edgy marketing companies with names like Blue Octopus or Rabid Monkey to define your brand, is coming to an end. Growing audience sophistication, cynicism, and the rise of user-generated media, are all working to undermine traditional marketing. As users take more control over messages-- as communities become the ones who define and drive the meaning of products-- companies will have to fall back on making outstanding products.
Some standout quotes:
On television: "They don't call it programming for nothing."
On social software and YouTube: "Content isn't king. Contact is king." Web 2.0 proves that we aren't interested so much content; we want other people.
On online sociability: "Feedback became more important than the feed, and making feedback became more interesting than feeding."