Horizon Project “Metatrends”

http://horizon.nmc.org/wiki/Metatrends

As you may have heard, this year’s Horizon Report has been published. I was again privileged to be part of the advisory board that helped create it.

During the course of the small foofraw that emerged last year around it’s publication I mused how it would be interesting to have some analysis looking back over the past projections. Well, it looks like someone was listening – I stumbled across this page on the project wiki (there is a corresponding page in the report, but it seems not the nice graphic) in which someone has identified the following 7 “meta-trends” extending across the 5 years of reports:

  • communication between humans and machines
  • the collective sharing and generation of knowledge
  • games as pedagogical platforms
  • computing in three dimensions
  • connecting people via the network
  • the shifting of content production to users
  • the evolution of a ubiquitous platform

What do you think? These strike me as broadly capturing many of the dynamics and innovations we are experiencing. – SWL

2 thoughts on “Horizon Project “Metatrends””

  1. Scott,
    I agree. i think this does a nice job of framing what the larger thematic implications of all the Web 2.0 explosion. The one that is unclear is computing in 3-D. I think we have seen some headway here with Gaming and Second Life, and this is still by far the least developed of the five, perhaps say the ubiquitous platform if Goggle isn’t considered as such:)

  2. Jim, that’s interesting – I took “computing in three dimensions” to also be about geolocation, mobile computing (and to a lesser extent “computer fabrication”). I will look into further what was intended (and quite possibly, as the term is ambiguous enough, all of them!) but understood in part as concerning “geolocation” (into which I’d include all the “locative computing” stuff, cf. Spook Country and Rainbows End) I’d say this is spot on to in fact be THE biggest disruption heading our way.

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