The Joy of Change
The year: 1993. The athlete: O.J. Simpson. My claim? He was the one athlete who was tied to a brand (Hertz) and didn’t fit my prediction: the death of the celebrity endorser. Then he took off in the white Bronco. And now there is Tiger.
It’s America online—my trend observation in 1994 that helped us maximize the consumer launch of America Online to compete with Windows ’95. Now that we’ve gone from 2400-baud modems to 3G networks, are we ever not online?
In 1995, big brands didn’t even anticipate our food fear and eating angst; then mad cows began to multiply, and suddenly it became sane to ask where the eggs were hatched that went into the egg salad sandwich you just bought at the corner diner. Today we know what’s organic, local, free-range, shade-grown, fair-trade, line-caught, sustainable…
Americanization isn’t globalization, modernization or even Westernization, as much as us Yankees wanted to think—a 1998 sighting—and this would lead to a great pushback against American power antics. Have U.S. popularity and status ever felt as precarious as they have in the past 10 years?
Bondi Beach is gorgeous, and the iMac in Bondi Blue was great foreshadowing of millennium blue in 1999—truly the color that changed fashion in the year that Y2K didn’t change anything else.
Singletons were rising in the late ’90s. The age for brides went from 21 to 41, we thought we could trick the fertility gods and, by the way, one of the best new ways to meet Mr. Right was online. Today, one in eight American couples marrying met on the Internet.
Around 1998, I sensed stirrings of glocalization, the trend of people thinking globally and acting locally. Now the buzzword is hyperlocalization, or increased concern over what’s going on in our immediate communities—but with the same awareness that those communities are intimately connected to the wider world.
In 1999, I worried that Net-based private eyes could be employed for background checks, satellite technology would enable anyone to purchase a photo of a spouse’s indiscretions, and parents would insist on having visual access to their little darlings at day care and even extend camera surveillance systems to their own homes. Now we can buy reports online for $9.95, Google Earth has photographed everything, nanny cams are commonplace and privacy is one of the biggest words in discussions of our virtual world, from Facebook policies to FTC regulations.
Ten years ago, I predicted that at parties or conferences people would answer a handful of questions and receive a tag in which their answers are stored. As they approached one another, lights on their tag would turn red (indicating a difference of opinion) or green (similar answers). I was right except about the device; now we can just use our phones.
At the dawn of the millennium, I thought intelligent refrigerators would track consumption, printing shopping lists on demand or transmitting them electronically to home delivery services. Now we can buy refrigerators with all that plus Internet connections that allow us to call them with our cell phones to see if the milk has expired.
Twentieth-century heroes relied on their brawn. Today, in our age of geek chic, they’re using their brains—and computer know-how. Rambo has given way to Iron Man.
Sex used to be just sex, until it got risky and moved online: Internet porn, cybersex, chat rooms and sexting. But as last year’s Craigslist killer proved, cybersex can carry its own dangers.
Just 10 years ago, couples dealing with infertility didn’t have many options. I foresaw that mail-order catalogs would provide details about egg and sperm donors, allowing prospective parents to shop for genetics in the comfort of their homes. It’s not catalogs but websites, and couples can search for Ivy League donors online.
When I started watching trends, we were all thinking of a Benetton world of multiculti global communities. But the tide has turned toward an “us and them” mentality, with European politics dominated by debates of headscarves and minarets, and anti-Americanism on the rise.
Not long ago, men were men, and gender lines were clear. Then men started caring about style and grooming, and the metrosexual—a word I helped make mainstream in 2003—was born. Now the pendulum is swinging back, with young men in fashionable precincts (Williamsburg, Brooklyn; the Mission in San Francisco) sporting lumberjack beards and learning to hunt.
In the early 2000s, China and India were still just developing countries. Now Chindia is ascendant, both financially—their economies are rare bright spots in the Great Recession—and culturally, with the spectacle of the 2008 Beijing Olympics and the success of Slumdog Millionaire.
Africa is still a developing continent, but instead of just writing it off, the people and governments who used to are increasingly concerned about HIV, food shortages, civil wars and genocide. Cultural powers from Bono to the Gap have made it a signature cause, and people are paying attention. Plus, African music and fashion are trendy.
Sex used to be just sex, part two: In 2005, I pointed out that sleep had become the new sex (The Economist quoted me on this in 2007). A good night’s sleep has come to beat a great orgasm, and an uninterrupted snooze is the most coveted luxury of all. As a result, we’re seeing more ads for everything from mattresses to herbal tea to Lunesta.
We used to write our diaries with pens on paper. We’re now living in the Age of the Blog. Blog was Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year for 2004—the year I included the mainstreaming of blogging on my annual predictions—and now Technorati lists more than 133 million blogs in the world.
Remember when a friend was someone you liked spending time with, and a network was what aired TV shows? Now everyone has a social and professional network, and we’re measuring our influence in terms of personal CPM (or cost per thousand, the unit marketers use to measure their level of exposure). Drawing on Charlene Li’s writings on Groundswell, I’ve been arguing for the importance of followers and friends. Now friend is a verb and its inverse, unfriend, is 2009’s Word of the Year.
