Friday, March 30, 2007

Is Futurism Dead? (New York Times, 1982)

As a follow-up to yesterday's post about the postmodern paleo-future here's an excerpt from the March 14, 1982 New York Times article, "Now and Then, Congress Also Ponders the Future."

....activity in the field [of futurism] has slowed to the point of stopping. "Actually, [futurism] died somewhere in the 1970's," said Michael Marien, the editor of "Futures Survey," a monthly abstract published by the World Future Society. "Nobody announced its death, but it happened." Mr. Marien, who has been monitoring futures literature for the past dozen years, said the flood of books on trends and forecasts is down to a trickle.

If you have a TimeSelect subscription you can read the entire article here.

See also:
Postmodern Paleo-Future

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

You maybe already mentionned it but I couldn't find it in your archives: http://badideaindeed.wordpress.com/2007/03/27/retro-futurology/ (how the 2004 home computer was imagined in the fifties).

Matt Novak said...

Thanks for the link, but that was actually a hoax.
http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/hoaxes/computer.asp

Anonymous said...

Damned, shame on me!