Returning to school from a long summer break of, amongst other things, immersion in books and discussions and online material to do with web and mobile developments, etc, is becoming something of a salutary shock: we talk a language and share ideas and visions that are nowhere near being the stuff of shared life generally. (Schools, as I've said before, often place the emphasis on maintaining — 'standards', 'learning', etc — rather than on innovation. It's the way the one now meets the other that's going to prove so interesting — lots of creative friction ahead.)
How we communicate about this perceived future, even now becoming the present, is very important and something which all teachers interested in helping schools re-imagine themselves for this century ought to be collaborating on very actively. Networks like the one that's formed at Elgg (to take just a single example) are going to become increasingly important as we push on through the era of the digital divide and into a common future.
I was thinking about this, anyway, but then Alex (Chadwick) sent me a link to Boing Boing where they'd picked up on Alex's (as in Alex Pang of IFTF's Future Now) post about the 1965 Braniff Airways film. (It seems likely that the film dates from '65 — see Boing Boing.) From the YouTube site:
… a glimpse of the wonderful future to come, in the form of supersonic air travel. There were just a few things they didn't figure on: The exclusivity and eventual failure of Concorde jets, the growth of global terrorism which would require increased pre-flight screening, and the biggest thing of all: that Braniff Airways wouldn't survive to the end of May, 1982.
Alex (Pang) comments:
The commercial is like a catalog of things that make futurists' professional lives hard.
- The design tries really hard to Look Like the Future. Everyone is wearing these robe-and-cowl things (the women look like Bene Gesserit going clubbing). Chairs have been replaced by giant eggs. (Perhaps in the future people are hatched; the commercial doesn't go there, thankfully.)
- Absolutely ordinary human activities have been automated. People don't walk any more: instead, their chairs are pushed around by robots or something.
- More seriously, the commercial makes the classic mistake of positing vast technological changes, with no accompanying social changes. When you watch, notice that the pilots are all men, and the cabin crew is all female. This is something you see in lots of "home of the future" exhibits. Geoffrey Nunberg wrote about this (PDF) so eloquently, it should be called the Nunberg Error.
Another salutary reminder of what needs to be done — and what shouldn't be done — in communicating ideas about the digital age we're now entering.
