For this session we had a lengthy discussion on the futuristic implications of media and were asked to potentially predict any social, technical, political and economical, which we then devised into PEST format for short (which is essentially the themes I just mentioned however abbreviated). The way we decided to structure and format our collective group ideas was to split up into separate groups to create branching off discussions and to see how may ideas we could generate. I really thought working in small groups provided a positive reaction in regards the amount of thoughts which we brainstormed and provided somewhat of a timeline on a whiteboard to try and give an idea of the spectrum and estimate how long our predictions would roughly take. The image attached below shows the list of ideas that some of us in the group had (not all of the ideas from the class were placed on the board however there was a group led discussion in regards to their ideas and also futuristic possibilities) and we structured ideas in sort of a timeline format ranging from 5 years, 10 years and 20 years.
In my group we decided to tackle each theme one at a time and to see what we can potentially come up with, throughout all of the ideas we managed to come up with I want to mention a few important conclusions that we thought were the most important and relevant (even the question given to us wasn’t based on being right or wrong but we wanted to try and go for a some amount of realism):
Political- our main outcome from what we discussed which could potentially happen in 20 years was something we called a “United Korea” where the borders between North and South finally come with peace. We thought this would be realistic only with a large time scale as it could take an extremely long time to be developed. Some major indicators I found for proposing this is because of the meetings Kim Jong un has had with President Trump and also the South Korean leader, with a viral clip of Kim Jong Un stepping inside the Korean border and shaking hands with the South Korean Leader and also there have been talks of Kim Jong Un being increasingly more open and inviting celebrities and public figures to North Korea, like the pop for example.
E conomical- With our idea of what we thought what future economical implications could occur in the near future and we decided on Cryptocurrency. We predicted that in the next 10-15 years there will be a dominance in the way of that another type of digital currency is used nationally or maybe perhaps a a universal worldwide currency that will be equal in all other technologically advanced countries. This idea came about with the idea of trading and Bitcoin being popular in past news articles. We also thought that physical currency wouldn’t be eliminated however some sort of social currency system is used and can be generated to purchase everyday items however with a convergence of this “social currency”.
S ocial- In regards to the social aspect we found for a short-
term advancement that virtual reality devices become more common around households and in general in regards to the manufacturing and also distribution. It made me think of this idea of hyper reality and how our world can be manipulated whilst simultaneously be simulated. We thought in the next 5 years this would dominate the console market and be even popular with its for, of unique escapism that it can offer to players/users.
T echnological- for the final theme of the technological we thought of the advancement of robotics and also artificial intelligence and also if they actually gained citizenship as an individual with independent thought. This prediction was our most ludicrous however we thought that perhaps a long way in the future (20 years plus) with the advancement in all technologies we may be something to think about even though that it may not seem palpable it is always worth to consider how fast AI is being developed and what extent it will end and peak.
It is also important to start thinking about potential projects that I could start to perhaps identify and work on. Attached below is a padlet of an array of ideas I could start to work on: