EPIC 2014: The Best/Worst Forecast Ever Made?

The eight minute film, EPIC 2014, made a huge impact on me when it was released in 2004.  If you have seen it before, it's worth watching it again.  If you haven't, let me set it up for you before you click the play button below.   

Put together by Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson way back in 2004, EPIC 2014 talked about the media landscape in 2014 as if it had already happened.  In other words, they invented a "Museum of Media History", and then pretended, in 2004, to look backward from 2014 as a way of exploring how they thought the media landscape would change from 2004 to 2014.  Watch it now; it will all make sense when you do:

 
In some ways, this is the worst set of predictions ever made.  Almost none of the point predictions are correct.  Google never merged with Amazon, Microsoft did not buy Friendster, The New York Times did not become a print-only publication for the elderly, and Sony's e-paper is not cheaper than real paper (It costs 700 bucks and gets an average of just 3 stars (on Sony's site!)).

Sloan and Thompson did foresee Google's suite of online software services but did not really anticipate competition from the likes of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube or any of a host of other social media services that have come to dominate the last 15 years.

None of that seemed particularly important to me, however.  It felt like just a clever way to get my attention (and it worked!).  The important part of the piece was summed up near the end instead.  EPIC, Sloan and Thompson's name for the monopolized media landscape they saw by 2014, is: 

"...at its best and edited for the savviest readers, a summary of the world—deeper, broader and more nuanced than anything ever available before ... but at its worst, and for too many, EPIC is merely a collection of trivia, much of it untrue, all of it narrow, shallow, and sensational.  But EPIC is what we wanted, it is what we chose, and its commercial success preempted any discussions of media and democracy or journalistic ethics."

Switch out the word "EPIC" with the word "internet" and that still seems to me to be one of the best long-range forecasts I've ever seen.   You could throw that paragraph up on almost any slide describing the state of the media landscape today, and most of the audience would likely agree.  The fact that Sloan and Thompson were able to see it coming way back in 2004 deserves mad props.

It also causes me to wonder about the generalizability of the lessons learned from forecasting studies based on resolvable questions.  Resolvable questions (like "Will Google and Amazon merge by December 31, 2014?") are fairly easy to study (easier, anyway).  Questions which don't resolve to binary, yes/no, answers (like "What will the media landscape look like in 2014?") are much harder to study but also seem to be more important.  

We have learned a lot about forecasting and forecasting ability over the last 15 years by studying how people answer resolvable questions.  That's good.  We haven't done that before and we should have.  

Sloan and Thompson seemed to be doing something else, however.  They weren't just adding up the results of a bunch of resolvable questions to see deeper into the future.  There seems to me to be a different process involved.  I'm not sure how to define it.  I am not even sure how to study it.  I do think, that, until we can, we should be hesitant to over-apply the results of any study to real world analysis and analytic processes.

The Media In 2014...From Predictions Made In 2004!

One of my favorite short films back in 2004 was one called "Epic 2014".  It was faux documentary that purported to report on the media scene in 2014.  It walks the viewer quickly through the history of the internet from Tim Berners-Lee up to 2004 (when the film was made) and then it begins to "report"/speculate about what the next ten years will hold.

If you haven't ever watched it or haven't watched it in awhile, take 8 minutes right now to take a look:



There is some silly stuff here (like Google-zon) and the video does not really hint at the rise of stuff like Facebook and Twitter (much less Instagram and Tinder...).

But the takeaway is an eerily prescient statement concerning the current state of the internet:

"At its best, edited for the savviest readers, [the internet] is a summary of the world - deeper, broader and more nuanced than anything available ever before.  But at its worst, and for too many,  [the internet] is merely a collection of trivia, much of it untrue, all of it narrow, shallow and sensational. But [the current state of the internet ] is what we wanted.  It is what we chose."

I don't know of anything that is quite this well done (or this insightful) about the future of the internet over the next 10 years (leave a comment if you do!) but I suspect that much of what we will be looking backwards at will involve new technologies like the one demonstrated in the 2 minute video below from Microsoft:



In case you are curious, the hardware and software capable of doing all this is coming to you next year.

2008 Technology, Media And Telecommunications Predictions (Deloitte)

Deloitte has made public its 2008 predictions for the technology, media and telecoms markets (Thanks, Suki!). The most interesting observation, for my money, came from the telecoms report that talked in some detail about the rise of the mobile telecoms companies in developing countries. Deloitte thinks that "operators in developed countries should move quickly if they wish to compete in these markets." Based on our research into sub-Saharan Africa, that seems to be about right. The importance and overall profitability of the prepaid wireless plans there is staggering.