Photo by manoftaste.de 
Forecasting the future is usually the job for fortune tellers and psychics – but it doesn’t preclude getting asked to give a calculated guess for what’s likely to happen in the next year/five years/foreseeable future. During my time at Razorfish in 2009, Denise Shrivell from MediaScope interviewed me, along with many of my colleagues and contemporaries, Australian digital and social experts in their fields and our predictions for the next five years were published on Digital Ministry. You can read the article with my 2009 predictions for 2014 here.
Five years later, I had well and truly forgotten about my predictions, so it was a fascinating exercise to re-read them and see how many digital media predictions had come true.
Denise did a follow up article with me and requested a new round of predictions for the future of digital media and asked for my assessment of the 2009 predictions, with new set of predictions for digital media trends from 2015 to 2019. The full article is on MediaScope.
- – Wearables and the quantified self movement will become completely mainstream – Just as iPhone begat the smartphone and tablet industry, Apple’s Watch will revolutionise wearable computing. All the personal data automatically being collected will start to change health, fitness and disease tracking. There will be an explosion of app development in this space, and a slow (or rapid) transformation of the health industry will begin.
- – Digital detox – Some people will need to unplug and turn off their constantly connected devices. Others will rebel at the always on nature of social media and many will opt out. These will be in the minority, as the interconnections due to social will continue to reduce the degrees of separation between people.
- – Retargeting will get more sophisticated Social and digital ad retargeting is so basic, let’s hope for smarter Ecommerce and even the option of users interacting with the ads themselves and feeding back as to whether the product was purchased offline.
- – Crowdsourcing and the sharing economy will continue to grow – these movements are continuing to grow rapidly and are only going to gain momentum- so it will be interesting to see how far they go.
Let’s see these fare in 5 years time 🙂