The Futurist Approach

The Futurist = Look for areas of change

 

Put on your Jetsons hat. Consider the world in five years. Think about a few specific small changes you expect to see. Now imagine some bigger ones. Each technological, social, cultural, economic and political change has implications for media and opens up new opportunities.

 

One former student of mine started Haptic.al to cover the emergence of virtual reality, just as venture capitalists were pouring billions into the sector and seeking reliable sources of information about the field. He had used the futurist lens to consider opportunities. The one he settled quickly led to a $50,000 fellowship at an accelerator focused on new technologies.

 

Another example: heightened political polarization can yield new opportunities for services that bridge the gap of understanding. After Trump took office in 2017, numerous media experiments arose to provide individuals with a window into content consumed and created by those far across the political spectrum.   

 

And social progress in the acceptance of gender identities and the continued strength of the LGBTQ movement have resulted in the emergence of numerous new media ventures addressing communities that had earlier lacked coverage.

 

To help people explore the impact of technology changes on media and journalism, take a few minutes to play the following game. This is an adaptation of a game we created at the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism featuring 13 new areas of technology. These are areas we think will continue to impact how information is gathered, organized, distributed and monetized for many years to come.

• Machine Learning

• Drones

• Wearable Computing

• Artificial Intelligence

• Augmented Reality

• Machine Translation

• Virtual Reality

• Motion Capture

• Bots/Robots

• Sensors

• Natural Language Processing

• Data Mining

• Internet of Things