It occurs to me that a new category we might monitor is how often futurist appears in “scare quotes.” When we say someone is a doctor or lawyer, we don’t put it in scare quotes. But many times “futurist” is, i.e.: so-and-so is a “futurist” who is going to…. A scare quote is a “phrase to signal that a term is being used in a non-standard, ironic, or otherwise special sense. They may be used to imply that a particular expression is not necessarily how the author would have worded a concept.” The latter interpretation fits with the emergence of the accidental category we’ve developed for tagging the articles. This category captures those usages of futurist where we found that the author was called a futurist, most likely without their consent, or we could infer that their primary professional identity was not as a futurist, but they were focused on a future-oriented topic and thus adopted futurist as a descriptor. Remember, anyone can call themselves a futurist. For that matter, anyone can call themselves a doctor, but they aren’t typically allowed to operate without credentials.
For example, I found the following header in one of the pieces: “How to be a futurist.” I’ll remove the name to protect the innocent: “[So-and-so] was a software programmer for Makerbot and a grad student from MIT’s Media Lab when he got asked to be a futurist consultant for the TV series Minority Report, which launched last year.” And he goes on to provide tips on being a futurist. There ya go!
That said, I check all the pieces in this last quarter and had a measly three scare quotes: two for futurist and one for clairvoyant. I think that’s progress. My recollection is that these square quotes used to be use much more frequently, so it’s good that they seem to be less necessary.
The Q2 FIM stats include 207 articles focused on “futurists.” Our analysis suggested 58 of these were “fresh” mentions (12 were repeated on multiple days) of relevance to foresight and professional futurists, that is, not about the art movement or band. Our media savvy friend Jack Uldrich came in at 9 mentions this quarter. Ray Kurzweil of Google came tied Uldrich this quarter with nine mentions as his public speeches continue to draw the attention of media outlets. So, 58 unique mentions in 90 days is two every three days. As we’ve been seeing — the public is not being overwhelmed by professional futurists!
Andy Hines
