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Author Topic: social future
Christine
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This topic will likely get close to modern/political things but I am bringing it up as an exploratory topic for a science fiction idea. Science fiction often deals with the future of technology or presents hypotheticals about alien contact, but of at least as much interest to me is the future of our society. I read very little that tries to predict what human society will be like in the future. Perhaps I'm walking right by it. Often, it is mixed in with other topics and that is interesting as well. But I've been thinking along the lines of 1984, which most people completely misunderstand and think is about how computers will lead the way for people to keep an eye inside our homes. In reality, there was very little technology in that novel. It was primarily about what humans will believe and allow to happen to themselves. Cameras were about as sophisticatd as the tech got. (For those who are unclear on this, read the book. It's a classic.)

ANYWAY....

I wanted to start a discussion about current social trends and how they may play out in the next 50 to 100 years. I have my own perceptions, of course, but I want to know what other people perceive and will believe. I will not try to cater to everyone (because that's pretty stupid, really), but I would like to share.

One thing that I've been thinking about lately is the increasing isolation of modern Americans. We spend our time talking to faceless, even nameless people on the internet. We don't talk to our neighbors. Heck, we're afraid our neighbors are closet criminals or sexual predators. My husband made a superme effort to get to know our neighbors when we moved in here and we only really know about 3 or 4 of them and only talk to 1 regularly.

The isolation, as I see it, has far-reaching effects. The only messages and opinions we tend to hear are from the media. Even on-line, it is usually considered wrong to talk politics or to get heated. Most of the opinions that get into my house come from NBC or Comedy Central (I love John Stewart )

Now, we can assume that things will continue along this course and not much will change, but where's the fun in that/ Besides, it is in the nature of humans to take advantage of situation. So enter the conspiracy theories that shape the world 50-100 years from now and you get a society in which people's minds are practically controlled for them, democracy (or representative democracy, as the case may be) is meaningless, and no one has the ability to form a group to combat it because we are all too isolated.

What d'ya think? I'd love to hear about this or any other perceptions of society that could guide the future. Obviously, there are many factors going into this.What other perceptions of where we are and where we're going are there?


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diddykong
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Interesting. My online english class just did an assignment and discussion board on this very subject. Our textbook talked about how our society seems to be being herded into one direction - a total life online for the middle class (and lower class). Working online, shopping online, communicating online, etc. - while the upper class will still maintain social contacts and will still circulate outside of the home. The upper class will remain in the social environment because they will have the money to hire help, go places, travel, exclusive shopping trips, social clubs, in-person work contacts, political circles, media exposure....

This class was a real eye opener for me to see just how we are being molded out of society.

Sociel contact is so important for learning how to interact, read people, and be part of the real world. The online world is a tunnel into society, but not a 3D interactive world.


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ChrisOwens
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To me, projecting current trends seems to lend to a future that leans toward Parable Of The Sower and/or Soyant Green, not to mention Pastwatch (without the time travel element).
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Zoot
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I guess a lot depends on the development of neuroscience and the computer chip, and how they interact. Right now a 2D world of graphics, text and sound is a poor representation of the real world. But will we one day be able to interact online using all five senses?
If we could eventually break the neural code and synthesise reality where will that take us socially?

Perhaps the surface of the Earth will be covered in one big city full of compartments with pickled brains in.

[This message has been edited by Zoot (edited December 06, 2006).]

[This message has been edited by Zoot (edited December 06, 2006).]

[This message has been edited by Zoot (edited December 06, 2006).]


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Robert Nowall
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Maybe you've read Isaac Asimov's The Naked Sun which details a world whose inhabitants live on vast estates, their needs served by robots, who communicate through sophisticated video technology---and who fear physical contact with each other. The issue's hardly new.
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Zoot
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No, Bob, I've never read Asimov. The idea was new to me, but please accept my humblest apologies for not having read it.
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luapc
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It's fairly obvious to me that the current world we live in was shaped by the technology of today--what it has offered, and taken away. Computers and the Internet are obvious examples. It used to be difficult to track people down, and to keep personal information from the masses. Now it seems like everything about a person is public knowledge. If you doubt this, go to a website that Elan pointed out in a past post on this site, zabasearch.com, and put in your own name.

The point is, that a lot of changes to society can be extrapolated from technology if the writer considers both the benefits, and the harm it will cause. It seems that as human beings as we try to better ourselves and our situation, we also harm ourselves and open up more ways to be hurt, often unintentionally.

The interesting thing about technology is that the technological advances never happen as quickly as people think they will for the obvious things, and yet, new things pop up continually. In the 50's they thought that everyone would be flying around in personal air cars by now. Imagine the changes to society that would have brought about, especially in a world with increased terrorism.

Personally, I see these advances into personal convenience continuing. Things like cell phones and PDA's, only better. What they will be I haven't thought much on, but I'm sure that whatever comes about will change the way we live, just as other things have already done.

One of the consequences of increased communication and information availability, is that we are less free than we once were, and it's likely to get worse. Consider the 1800's when travel was slow and information almost impossible to get. A person could commit a crime in one town, move 100 miles away, and never be caught. Now, you can't count on getting away from an overdue car payment even half way around the world.

Anyway, to summarize my ramblings, I think a good way to build a futuristic society, is to fill in the major technologies, consider what that would do for human interaction, communication, and travel, and create social action and interaction from that. After all, we are what we eat, wear, drive...


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Christine
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Thanks for the input.

I did want to say, however, that I am NOT interested in discussions of how technology is going to shape the next 50-100 years. I know they are difficult to separate in this information age, but the truth is that I feel, as the PP mentioned, that technological advanced occur more slowly than people realize and that, give or take, in 50-100 years we will be looking at the social repercussions of the technology that already exists rather than having to think about how new technology will play into that.

I did read that Assimov book, by the way. It's been a while but I recall the gist of it -- the book took the concept to an extreme. I am interested in a realistic (or as realistic as I can make it) look into the next century.


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oliverhouse
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Warning: Stupidly Long Post.

Brain dump of ideas for discussion, primarily from an American point of view (though with possible implications for other parts of the world):

1. Current ideas about tolerance.

A. Before affirmative action, the model for tolerance of other races was "color blindness". With affirmative action, there was "positive" discrimination in order to get equality of results rather than equality of opportunity. There appears to be a backlash from the positive discrimination of affirmative action, _and_ there appears to be a backlash against color blindness when it comes to (primarily) Arabs.

Similarly, the reasonableness of groups of like races (or other classes) to join together is in flux. Are we a melting pot or a mosaic? Is it reasonable for black people to want to congregate with black people? White with white? Or are racial boundaries passe, so we should only look at more specific affiliations: Cuban with Cuban? Irish with Irish? Carribean with Carribean?

How these competing forces play out, and how they fare in the light of the American "meritocratic" ideals, will be very interesting over the next 50-100 years.

B. Ideas about religious tolerance are becoming very confused right now. (Maybe it's just me that's confused about them, but of course I don't think so.)

Once upon a time Americans said, in public and on Official Government Letterhead, that our inalienable rights were given to us by a Creator Whom all acknowledged (although they had differing opinions about His/Her/Its attributes).

In our more recent drive to provide a separation of Church and State, we are becoming intolerant of religious ideas being brought into the public sphere; religion is becoming seen more and more as something strictly private. But a religion (including atheism*) that's sincerely believed can't help but be part of one's public attitudes. Since religious beliefs and attitudes affect our moral attitudes, and the state regulates moral issues (murder, capital punishment, theft, etc. -- even the notion of what a "right" is), the attempt to completely disentangle them ends in confusion.

So, for example, strict Muslims seeking a Caliphate and Shari'a law see themselves as morally upright, which makes for a quandary among people who on the one hand don't want to discriminate against other religions, but on the other can't tolerate the intolerance that Shari'a would bring about.

That's one example among many.

As another, as a pro-life Catholic, I'm often told that I shouldn't "impose my religion on others". What people don't understand is that I was pro-life long before I was a devout Catholic, and I see their relegation of my beliefs to a strictly "private" sphere as completely wrongheaded. This is true of many people: their religious beliefs and moral beliefs correspond, and saying that one is logically prior to the other tries to make nice categorical boxes where none exist.

Whether any one person agrees with my position is irrelevant for the purposes of the discussion; what's important is that ideas about the relationship of government and religion could easily shift over the next decades.

* I know that many atheists will say that atheism isn't a religion, and I'm not going to argue otherwise here; the point is that atheism, "hard" or "soft", brings with it and engenders certain attitudes and beliefs about the nature of whatever God/gods exist (or not) that come into play for the purposes of this discussion.

C. The notion of liberty may shift. We've already seen a shift away from certain types of civil liberties today (in fact, the phrase used to be "civil liberty" -- the fact that we isolate some liberties as different from others is itself a shift), such as the right to free association: the Boy Scouts are criticized for not allowing openly homosexual scoutmasters, companies have been sued for not hiring enough of this or that type of protected group, and so on. In this case, that shift was made because people wanted to achieve a particular type of freedom that negated the other person's freedom: generally I think of it as a "freedom from something" (as in freedom from prejudice against sexual orientation) as opposed to a "freedom to do something", but that's not really fair, because each one can be worded either way.

There was an old notion that your freedom to swing your fist stops at the end of my nose, but our noses seem to have gotten a lot closer together over time.

2. Sociological impact of changing technology

Although you weren't specifically thinking of technological change, I think you need to look at the social effects of technological change.

For example, as it gets easier for me to commute from the country, or to stay away from city centers altogether, I could become much more isolated from the plight of the city. The riots in New York might seem as unreal to me as the battle scenes in a movie. As long as it doesn't affect me, I might not care. Or it might be trivially easy to visit third-world countries, which brings us closer to the people in impoverished countries, sparking a greater commitment to helping these people through Peace Corps-style activities. Or it might lead to greater religious strife as people try to travel as missionaries more often.

Information overload is going to be interesting. We already tend to believe too much of what some people say too easily, and we tend to ignore giant conspiracy theories even if they might be true. Improved communication will make the discrepancies between worldviews that much more obvious (consider the number of Arabs who insist that 9/11 was a Mossad plot to get the US to start a crusade against the Arab world), but not necessarily more easily resolved. Ideas that used to slowly work themselves out with isolated contact over the course of decades may come to a head among individual citizens much more quickly, with possibly violent and disastrous results -- which may have further implications for how we protect ourselves (be that through more gun control or less, moving out of the cities (for lower population densities) or into them (for better police protection), increased government intrusion into our habits and thoughts (brought on from fear of those who get violent) or increased demand for freedom from intrusion (from fear of government-perpetrated conspiracies)).

3. Demographic shifts

A. I've already alluded to this, but the population could shift its geographic distributions more. Montana could become more populated, for example, with (say) the resulting backlash by people who want it unspoiled, the class divisions between the natives and the transplants, etc.

B. Hispanic and Arab birth rates and immigration rates are much higher than black or white birth rates, and there will no doubt be an effect there. (Victor Davis Hanson recently wrote a book -- _Mexifornia_? -- about some of the effects we're already seeing because of the Mexican migration.) There could even be real changes in political boundaries as a result -- I can see, for example, the Hispanic population of, say, Texas becoming very high, with a resultant non-hispanic backlash, and a hispanic "nationalist" leader calling on them to remember their Mexican heritage, and having them "take back the Alamo" so to speak -- becoming either independent or part of Mexico. Arabs could demand Shari'a in a part of the US, and the Federal government, overwhelmed by a war with somebody, could be powerless to prevent them from seceding.

C. In other parts of the world, the male / female ratio is already skewing pretty hard. I can see a situation in which wealthy Chinese (and Indian, and whatever) send their sons to America to find suitable wives because there aren't enough women in China. (Attitudes of women might also change significantly in China once they're a "scarce resource".)

This was fun, but I have a real job to do. Is this what you meant, Christine? Keep talking about the bits that interest you, and I promise not to write so much next time...

Regards,
Oliver


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wetwilly
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I think that racism will fade and eventually disappear or come close to disappearing. Statements that my parents think are acceptable come across as very racist to me, and things that were acceptable to their parents seem very racist to them. I think the trend will continue, and racism will fade away.

That's going to be many years down the road, though, maybe three or four generations.

That's not to say that people will stop being ignorant, bigoted, and hateful. That will never change. Race will just cease to be the big object of discrimination, and some other attribute will replace it. Religion, maybe. Or physical disability. Or mental disability. Whatever it is, some other "-ism" will replace racism.


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Spaceman
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Christine,

Social/political future is nothing new to SF. This was a major topic in the '60s. Think Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison, the aforementioned Asimov, and even David Gerold. The topic is fair game and probably one that's been passe for so long it's ripe for a resurgence.


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Survivor
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One problem with extrapolating a social "trend" over the course of 50-100 years is that social trends almost never last that long. A hundred years ago, most people were probably a good deal more isolated than is currently the case, for example. You had people living in impovershed (by modern standards) rural areas and people living in simply terrible conditions in urban areas. A very small suburban middle class existed and was seen as something of a model for the future, but they also were relatively isolated.

The other problem with extrapolating a social trend is that there are very real limits on how far you can change certain variables of social behavior before your society as a whole sufferes catastrophic failure. Societal failure does happen. Our own society is going to fail in only a couple of decades, at best. Social failure happens when a significant portion of the population can no longer rely on the existing social mechanisms to protect their essential interests. Of course, essential is defined by the individual, but most people would include things like life, conscience (meaning the ability to do something that you believe is right) and at least some liberty.

What constitutes a "significant" portion of the population depends largely on who has enough power to undermine the social order should they decide to commit themselves to overthrowing/undermining the system. Technological advance is particularly dangerous in this regard, as more individuals gain greater relative destructive power, you need to increase the number of people that you keep very happy. In a technologically primative society, you can keep the top 10% of physically dangerous individuals happy with your system and you'll be pretty safe from a total social upheaval, simply because those happy 10% can beat up pretty much everyone else. You do need to make sure that your 10% really does include most of the individuals who are really good in a fight...either that or you need to increase the percentage of people you're keeping happy.

But as technology advances, the number of people that are realistically capable of posing a serious threat to your social order constantly increases. Eventually, you end up having to keep everyone happy. The difficulty of accomplishing this increases geometrically with the number of people you're trying to include in your society. Which means that a larger society will inevitably break down into warring factions until the technological level is reduced or the population sorts itself out into geographically separate areas with defensible boundries.

This is the case even if we don't look at the inept and rather brain dead way our current political system constantly tries to court the favor of minorities at the expense of the majority. Factoring that in, we might have less than a decade before a major social upheaval that will make the last Civil War look like a tea party.


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hoptoad
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not so much the 'glass is half-full' kind of guy, eh?

[This message has been edited by hoptoad (edited December 07, 2006).]


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oliverhouse
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WetWilly said:
quote:
I think that racism will fade and eventually disappear or come close to disappearing. Statements that my parents think are acceptable come across as very racist to me, and things that were acceptable to their parents seem very racist to them. I think the trend will continue, and racism will fade away.

Race, and the issues around it, are very interesting. What is it? Does it really exist, or is it a chimera perpetuated by one's upbringing? What are the implications of the answers to these questions?

I read a study that indicates that race probably can be minimized or eliminated as a factor in social relations -- but the same study seems to indicate that other factors take the place of race in that case. [Kurzban, Cosmides, and Toomby, with an easy-to-read synopsis here.] So what are those factors? And, importantly but beyond the scope of the study, what happens when a society is homogeneous enough that race becomes a de facto differentiator among people?

One answer comes from the only fashion book worth reading, John Malloy's Dress For Success. I'm not fashionable at all, but everyone should read this book.

There are doubts about how far race can be minimized, too, though; for example, see this study, which specifically response to Kurzban et al in section three.

And so far I've only discussed race itself -- what about the social implications of one of these views of race? What happens if you assume that one of the views is correct, but that the society has a different view?

Survivor said:

quote:
One problem with extrapolating a social "trend" over the course of 50-100 years is that social trends almost never last that long.

Lots of trends are short-term oscillations with long-term trends. Race is one of those things, in fact: institutionalized discrimination led to an official policy of color-blindness, which was followed by institutionalized discrimination (affirmative action), which shows signs of giving way to a form of color blindness, but all the while people are coming to recognize that if race can be a determining factor for anything, that still doesn't reduce the essential dignity of the individual.

Two other century-plus-long trends include sexual libertinism and a trend toward greater government programs vs. individual or clan self-reliance.

Here's another, simpler guess at something the world will see within a century: the bare mouth will become taboo. In Japan right now people often wear surgical masks in public, partly because of their high population density. Get enough outbreaks of bird flu-like diseases, and more people may start to wear them. But as that happens, trendy people will want to look _good_. Facemasks will become like neckties, stylish and powerful; people will eat by bringing their food behind the masks; mouths will become erotic, and good girls won't kiss on the first date. Maybe perfect teeth will become a sign of vanity.

Just a thought.

Regards,
Oliver

[This message has been edited by oliverhouse (edited December 06, 2006).]


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Robert Nowall
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Yeah, one of science fiction's proudest traditions is "If this goes on..." (almost as important as "What if...?") So many works have been written from "If this goes on..." but there's always room for another perspective on something. Or maybe a rebuttal of something someone else has written.
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Christine
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Of course it isn't new!! I never tired to say it was new. it has a proud tradition. What it isn't, is current. The most recent extrapolations of the playing out of a modern social environment are almsot 50 years old. They are irrelevant. Perhaps that is because, as Survivor says, social trends don't last that long. But maybe what I'm trying to do is really make a commentary on our own time.
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Elan
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quote:
I did want to say, however, that I am NOT interested in discussions of how technology is going to shape the next 50-100 years. I know they are difficult to separate in this information age

I'm not sure you CAN separate them out. I had the good fortune a few years ago to attend a lecture given by Stephen Hawking in person. One of the topics he spoke on was how our computerized information age will actually affect the evolution of our species; in other words, technology is beginning to change our physiology. THAT concept has stuck with me.

I read another book, "Molecules of Emotion" written by Candice Pert, who is a research scientist at Georgetown University. Pert discovered the opiate receptor in cells, leading to the current day treatment for AIDS (among other things). Pert mentioned a similar concept. She's also made the discovery that our emotions are literally located throughout our bodies. When you feel fear in the pit of your stomach, the cellular signal of that emotion is indeed eminating from your stomach, not your brain. It's an incredibly fascinating book, if you like that sort of thing.

I'm also currently reading a book called "The Tipping Point" by Malcolm Gladwell. He discusses the socialogical elements that have "stickiness," and outlines how information becomes a "verbal epidemic" with the ability to radically change society.

You want a potential horror story on changes needed in society? Watch "An Inconvenient Truth."

I love this stuff.


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Survivor
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I think that everyone managed to sidestep my main point, which was that a trend that does continue for 50-100 years is usually a danger sign of a society that is losing some vital element of equilibrium. Any basically healthy society can accommodate some minor continuous change that doesn't have an inherently destructive teleology. But if a lot of things are constantly changing, and always in the same direction, then your society is headed for catastrophic collapse no matter how much you personally approve of those changes.

Now, catastrophic collapse sounds pretty bad. But really, it's not like nations don't survive just because the society has undergone a total collapse. Consider the Civil War or the Great Depression. Sure, it was tough, but people survived.

Moving back to the point of isolation, I don't see it as much of a real problem now. If the current trend of more and more information becoming ever more available continues, then your scenario could never happen. But it isn't going to continue. Vast sections of what we consider the Internet will collapse along with a lot of other infrastructure during the coming crisis, and if a repressive government rises to power during that period, it is likely to be rebuilt as more of a means of information control than free exchange. So you can look at the cup as being pretty nearly full, as long as you're okay filling it with the blood of human misery


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franc li
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The information on the internet is already massively controlled by commercial interests. There was a time that the smarty-pants dreaded the thought of the www becoming a giant marketplace. Ooops.
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arriki
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What I worry about is the prevalence of advertising. And spam and popups and things. Aggressive advertising. And...if this goes on....

Some people are looking forward to cellphones and the internet morphing into wetware. But, imagine having that inside your head where it becomes difficult to turn it off. Add to that aggressive advertising/political hype. Now you have real problems with thoughts that are not your own. I recall hearing about some advertising in Japan where the sound of a can of pop being opened and the fizzing and all was being projected at passersby in hope of creating a thirst in said passersby who would go buy a can.

Also, with information -- the problem I have is who is telling the truth and who is spinning it and who is outright lying? Once, with books and magazines, it was so expensive to produce them on large scales that you sort of depended on the publishers to sift the truth out, at least to some extent. But now on the internet it's hard to tell truth from fanaticism from bald-faced lies.


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Survivor
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It's not any harder than it is in a library or newsstand. Given that many liars are good at lying in person, it isn't even any harder than detecting lies in everyday conversation. I'd say it's much easier, because you have simultaneous access to many different opinions. That's the essential aspect of the Internet that has to be eliminated if it's to become an effective means of thought control. It also happens to be the same aspect that makes the Internet useful to advertisers, by the way. The vast majority of ads on the Internet are placed by advertisers who aren't wealthy enough to purchase significant amounts of air-time on the major television networks, after all.
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franc li
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quote:
But, imagine having that inside your head where it becomes difficult to turn it off. Add to that aggressive advertising/political hype. Now you have real problems with thoughts that are not your own.

I guess if I already feel this happens, it could be a symptom of my OCD. Something I find interesting as well is my brain's need to run logic opposite to any idea that it does not instantly agree with (and often even ones it would normally agree with). But I think that may be a personality trait more than an affective disorder.

Getting back to the original issue more, one may or may not agree with the observation on human nature in Gone with the Wind that we tend to be more like our grandparents than our parents. The differing cycles of the generations converge, bend, and reflect in ways that perhaps can be read by those for whom our little lives are like radio waves.


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Entheos
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I think we are heading for a much more homogeneous world where cultural changes are smoothed out. It is still possible to visit a culture in another part of the world and learn so much just from another people's ways of seeing things and dealing with the difficulties of life over periods of centuries.

In the future it is likely we will be less and less able to find cultures that have their own values and ways of reacting to life. There will be too much interaction, intermarriage, global communication, etc. to keep separate cultures. There may be intercultural groups that form around common principles, and thus we would have worldwide "principle" and common cosmology groups that may develop cultural elements around those principles, but on a worldwide scale.

What do you think?


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hoptoad
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i am a bit of a 'the glass is overflowing with the blood of innocents' guy too.

The conclusion — that a trend that continues 50–100 years or more is probably a sign of an unbalanced society in a spiral — is virtually inescapable.

The collapse of the society of Easter Island is an example. What were they thinking when they cut down that last tree? Clearly, recognising the symptoms of a spiralling social system does not guarantee that you will prevent the catastrophe. Probably just makes you seem like a loony wilderness prophet with a body-odour issue and burrs in your beard.

[This message has been edited by hoptoad (edited December 08, 2006).]


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LaceWing
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Christine (and others):

If you like doing research, this book and these links might be good places to start:

[u]Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community [/u] by Robert D. Putman, 2000

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Darwinism

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_capital

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gated_community

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communitarianism

There is also much insight to be gained from government and marketing trend reports. (I can't find my links for this.)

edited to add . . .
via www.futurismic.com I just came across this link. Quick scan indicates positive trends to think about:

http://www.openthefuture.com/2006/11/the_new_world_the_rise_of_the.html

[This message has been edited by LaceWing (edited December 09, 2006).]


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Survivor
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Hey, I know that it's a bit late in the conversation to mention this, but you should check out some Singularity sites as well, as long as you're looking at probable futures where information technology continues to advance unimpeded by major wars or upheavals for the next 50 years or more.

I will stay on the "blood of human misery" side here by pointing out that any trans-human intelligence is almost certain to have goals incomprehensible to humans and those goals will probably be harmful to the survival prospects of the vast majority of humanity. Humans, not being remotely superhuman in intellect, often delude themselves by thinking that the highest possible motives must correspond to their own values. But there is no evidence for this whatsoever. Even if a trans-human intelligence did have values compatable with certain humans, you need only ask which humans to realize that most of the humans on this planet would be your enemies if they had unlimited power at their disposal.

quote:
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. But it Rocks absolutely, too.

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Christine
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I just wanted to say thank you to everyone who responded. I've been dealing with sickness (me and the baby) and computer problems for a week or so. I'll read the posts more thoroughly and do individual responses later.
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h jacob buller
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While the legend of John Titor remains disputed and in controversy, the pictures he paints of a world only thirty years away seem pretty accurate. Especially given the way technology is shaping our lives. I think it's a safe bet that there will be greater emphasis on communal living just to get away from the technological chaos our cities direct on us.

The greater question is not what will we evolve into, but what is our earth going to do to us for our abuse of it? And how well will we be prepared, and how will we evolve to fit it? Bases on the moon are still 14 years away. Stephen Hawking thinks we're going to mess up earth so bad we need to colonize space.

[This message has been edited by h jacob buller (edited December 15, 2006).]


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Survivor
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I don't care how bad things get, nobody will be sending guys back in time to grab thirty year old computer hardware to debug the mainframes of the future, either computers will go dramatically backwards or they will advance by at least three orders of magnitude by then. Plus, that insignia is a joke.

Some of the predictions are the sort that any half intelligent person could make from where we now stand, others are just silly, some are plausible enough but directly contradict others.


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Elan
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Hey! The future is now, and it's us.

You... collectively the "we" form of You.... have been named Time's "Person of the Year." You. Yes, You. Someone is recognizing the change in society.

http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/12/16/time.you.tm/index.html

Gee. You/we beat out Kim Jong Il, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Donald Rumsfeld for the honor. Hoo boy.


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wbriggs
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More gated communities -- public spaces that are private property, so suspicious people can be booted out legally. More public spaces treated as private property, as in areas of LA where it's a suspicious act to be present after 5 pm.

In Europe, incorporation of sharia law into civil law, to please a vigorous minority with a vigorous birth rate. Seriously.

In Japan, more robots to take care of an aging population that doesn't want immigrants.

Race per se replaced with ethnic resurgence in the US: not just "Kiss Me, I'm Irish," but serious squabbles over resources.

US and European legislatures become like the Imperial Roman Senate and the House of Lords: prestigious but powerless. Political action means convincing the right judge to rule your way.

iPods and Blackberrys (or the 2040 equivalent) for the masses. No digital divide, because everybody wants entertainment.

Latin America almost as Protestant as the USA in our lifetime.

Africa stays an economic disaster. Parts that recover start sending missionaries to the US, and (covertly) to Europe -- covertly because Europe bans Christian missionaries.

US lobbies for "most favored nation" status with China, which becomes the world's premier market. Anti-Chineseism becomes a word as the Chinese Navy owns the seas. US states debate English Only rules, not to keep out Spanish, but to keep out Mandarin.

Primary international conflict: militant Islam versus everybody else.

Crime rate drops a lot in Canada, US, Japan, Oz, NZ, and Europe. Demographics.

More polarization of the religious/political spectra among the people; more homogeneity at the highest level as EU commissioners begin to appoint themselves, and US judges issue orders to our executive branch of who to appoint.

Israel, covered with big, smoking radioactive crater. Shortly after that, smoking radioactive craters all over Iran.


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hoptoad
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Elan: its intereting that those three guys came in behind every other human being on earth...

[This message has been edited by hoptoad (edited December 17, 2006).]


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Elan
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quote:
Elan: its intereting that those three guys came in behind every other human being on earth...

Good point. I hadn't thought about it before. Does that make those three guys "Them," instead?


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Spaceman
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Technically, them is part of us. It's the second major cop-out by Time in recent memory.
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