Connections – Stable Instabilities

1. Connections – Stable Instabilities Michael Hulme Director, Social Futures Observatory

2. Habits • Habituated behaviours - regularly repeated behaviour that can require little or no thought and is learned rather than innate • Habituated behaviours - represent ‘arrests’ or stabilities within flows and processes • Habituated behaviours - are useful as the means for conserving higher mental processes for more demanding tasks, but they promote behavioural inflexibility • Habituated behaviours - function within complex interconnected systems, connectivity being a factor in sustaining/breaking behaviours

4. Changes • Kodak - currently bankrupt and Chapter 11 protection • ‘failed to adapt to Digital’ - yet in 1975 it created the Digital camera! • “We developed the worlds first consumer digital camera and Kodak could have launched it in 1992. We could not get approval to launch or sell it because of fear of the cannibalisation of film.” (D.Strickland, former Kodak V.P) • It took nearly 20 years for Digital cameras to become widely popular • Jonathan Margolis, a technology editor for Financial Times says “ I remember in XXXX Sony Ericsson showed of a phone with a clip-on camera. Along with everyone else, I thought ‘why would you want a phone with a camera?’” • Peoples’ behaviour in public has fundamentally changed thanks to mobile phone cameras - “I was there” Informal / spontaneous, shared, everything subject to record

6. Themes of Habituation - Current Keys to the Future? • Personal Life Flow • Personal Mobility (within larger systems) • Mobility of information / data (dispersal of identity, issues of privacy) • Ease / convenience • Connectedness (emphasises social systems) • Massification and reinforcement From the ‘Information Age’ to ‘Personal Informed Reality’

7. 1980s Video conferencing - a failed solution to problem of mobility / presence & cost? Adoption – Minimal, impact even less Skype on iPad/tablet, 4th most download app Christmas 2011 Personal yet socially connected - the video habit! – mass adoption? Video conferencing - a failure in the future?

8. Essentially text-based connectedness - with pictures / video Life Flow; easy & mobile Video / pictures with text - the future?

9. HS2 - what sort of time does it save? Physical Time or Effective Time? - A solution without organisation? • “Now is the time for us to be looking at vehicles on the road the same way we look at smartphones, laptops and tablets; as pieces of a much bigger, richer network” (W.C Ford Jr., 03/2012) • “Finance spun so far out of control, it stopped being a servant of the economy...money is a vital fluid that must flow freely and safely throughout our fragile, interconnected world”(G.Tett, Fools Gold)

10. Habits and Future Challenge • Challenge to organisations and organisers - understanding the keys of habit: Desired and undesired habits • Habitual behaviours (or perhaps mass behaviours) often appear fixed - Locked In, but can change suddenly • Habitual behaviours often linked to ‘tool’ availability / adoption - but actual behaviour may be unforeseen/able • Intense interconnection within complex systems of influence can reinforce behaviours or destabilise apparent stabilities • Despite some themes / keys, uncertainty - Habits & Futures are non-deterministic • Acting on a potential future is even less certain:

11. In 1965 the BBC broadcast the first edition of ‘Tomorrows’ World’; amongst issues discussed was measures to combat water shortages in UK!