On Trend

The Business of Forecasting the Future

Devon Powers

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780252051739
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología

Trends have become a commodity—an element of culture in their own right and the very currency of our cultural life. Consumer culture relies on a new class of professionals who explain trends, predict trends, and in profound ways even manufacture trends. On Trend delves into one of the most powerful forces in global consumer culture. From forecasting to cool hunting to design thinking, the work done by trend professionals influences how we live, work, play, shop, and learn. Devon Powers' provocative insights open up how the business of the future kindles exciting opportunity even as its practices raise questions about an economy increasingly built on nonstop disruption and innovation. Merging industry history with vivid portraits of today's trend visionaries, Powers reveals how trends took over, what it means for cultural change, and the price all of us pay to see—and live—the future.

PART ONE

CHAPTER 1

Trending

Remember eating Tide PODs? Remember President Dotard? Remember #The-Dress? (It was definitely gold and white.) Remember the ice bucket challenge and the mannequin challenge, the Harlem Shake and Gangnam Style, plane bae and distracted boyfriend and all the things you should have done by thirty-five? It’s entirely plausible that you remember none of these things. They are pop culture ephemera, memes and trivia, social media folderol that bred newspaper headlines, bits on radio morning shows, and segments on the nightly news. It’s also plausible that you never noticed some of these moments. Maybe you’re not American, not middle-aged, not coastal, or not on Twitter. Maybe you gave up trying to follow right now a long time ago. Either way, each captured enough attention to warrant even more attention. Each drove—if only for a fleeting, utterly forgettable instant—a wave of cultural conversation.

In contemporary parlance, each trended.

The unique contemporary connotation of trends began in 2006, when Google Trends first launched.1 Google Trends tracked the frequency of search terms, which could be compared to other terms or analyzed by geography. Two elements of this new feature made it immediately compelling. The first was its emphasis on time-dependent data; Google Trends changed each day, providing a window into behaviors that were tantalizingly of-the-moment. Second, and relatedly, was the nature of the observations these search data provided. Seen in aggregate, search terms allowed us to draw conclusions that previously had been difficult or impossible to ascertain, giving meaning to what the mass of us were searching at any given time.

Twitter followed two years later with its own trending feature, and that feature has been even more consequential. Twitter Trends consists of an algorith-mically updated list of popular hashtags, which Twitter sorts geographically. Something can trend in Topeka but not Tallahassee, in Croatia but not Chile. In an enthusiastic blog post from that inaugural season, one writer proclaimed that “at a glance I’m able to see what the world considers important in this moment, which lights a path to explore what matters to me.”2 Claiming that the summation of tweets amounted to something “important” was perhaps a bit of a stretch; pundits, then as now, debated Twitter’s purpose and viability.3 Even so, the effect of Twitter Trends has been unmistakable. It provides a handy proxy for popularity, quickly asserting its utility as a synonym for cultural relevance.

Many other companies use trending algorithms to organize their content and draw conclusions about user behavior. “Trending” therefore feels like an innovative response to a contemporary dilemma. In some ways, it is. As we search, click, tweet, snap, and hashtag our way through our media ecosystems, trending evaluates our behaviors en masse, reminding us that we participate in a greater whole. Tarleton Gillespie, a media and information scholar, identifies this as how trending algorithms “call together publics rather than fracturing them.”4 In revealing what’s nascent, ascendant, or burbling in our midst, trends provide a window into who we are and where we’ve been. Trending is not just a passive mirror of culture, though. It actively creates it. Trending algorithms not only select what to reveal and focus on but also set up further decisions to be made on account of those actions—gathering more attention or serving as a barometer of public sentiment, for instance. (For this reason, some critics have argued that trending algorithms should be abandoned, noting that their opacity and gameability make them a “worthless metric”; Facebook, in response, eliminated trending in 2018.)5

Thinking about trends in terms of futurism clarifies what Gillespie calls the “self-affirming” nature of trending.6 Trends may gather the recent past to make claims about the present, but they always aspire to guide the future. Their goal is to shape perception and compel action. In this sense, the problems trending addresses, as well as those it creates, are of distinctly older vintage. Since the turn of the twentieth century, stewards and observers of culture have attempted to gather information to detect cultural patterns and with those make best guesses about the future. Then, as now, they were driven by the anxieties that arose from what felt like rapid, uncontrollable change. Then, as now, they put the latest technologies to work to assist them in making these determinations. And then, as now, professionals emerged to wield and sharpen these tools and to make them consumable.

This chapter focuses on how trends became a solution to the problems of modernity—a way to apprehend cultural information and make decisions about the future. Trends became an important technology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries because they addressed two urgent problems within a swiftly modernizing society. The first problem, driven by the growth of the social sciences, concerned how to distill generalizable social patterns from the rising amounts of data being collected about the world. The second problem stemmed from the attempt to find applications for this new knowledge: Could patterns, once discerned, aid the work of prediction? A range of professions imagined trends as the key to understanding the future and gaining control and advantage in a world of unyielding change. From there, trends became firmly attached to consumer culture and began their passage into the commodity they are today.

What I offer below is a prehistory of cultural trend forecasting, whose story I begin formally in the next chapter. Though historical, the tale I tell here in many ways reflects our own time. Our obsession with knowing where culture might go and monetizing that knowing is long-standing. Our belief that some people are ahead of others and thereby lead cultural change is deeply rooted. And our confidence that with the right tools we can control the future is an unshakeable aspect of our humanity, our resolve, and our folly.

Trends in Data

The modern career of trends began amid the rise of university-based social sciences disciplines and their varied methods of systematic social observation. Ethnography grew in popularity in the late nineteenth century, originally popularized as part of a positivistic, imperial project of collecting empirical data about non-Western cultures.7 In the early 1900s the Chicago school of sociology pioneered a similar procedure via the notion of fieldwork, gathering qualitative evidence from the surrounding world to make inductive generalizations about social ills.8 Collected observations of these varieties could be used to indicate normal or common tendencies among or between examples, which the word “trend” was sometimes used to describe. In 1898 an American anthropologist named Alice C. Fletcher wrote in a study of the Omaha tribe of an unusual song she heard during a hair-cutting ritual; it “rises and dwells upon the tonic, which is rare in Indian music, the general trend of the songs being from high to lower tones.”9 Sociologists around the turn of the twentieth century found their own trends, in legislation, philosophy, in habits, and in sensibilities, as they took stock of the world and its diverse manifestations of social order.10

Quantitative methods and statistical analyses had also made inroads into the social sciences by the late nineteenth century.11 As the idea that social life could be subjected to the scientific method came into vogue, evolving methods, complex mathematical formulae, and growing data sets served to unveil patterns in the social as never before, based, as Ian Hacking has argued, on the idea of “normalcy and deviation from the norm.” In particular, even as determinism was losing its grip over the hard sciences, the emergence and growing power of statistical probabilities revived the quest to discover laws of social behavior.12 Turning toward averages, likelihoods, patterns, and change over time, the social sciences became newly empowered, obsessed with the idea that scientific acuity would display the hidden intricacies of social operation.

The development of social sciences grounded in the precepts of scientific method was both a cause and a symptom of a diminishing focus on individual agency within complex societies. Instead, there was a growing acceptance that “human events were caused not by personal intentions and actions close at hand, but by impersonal, distant, and less apparent causes.”13 In the emerging subfield of “social forces,” these ideas compelled researchers to identify, grasp, and measure the business cycle, social progress, public opinion, or reforms like prohibition or feminism—social dynamics that were not always visible in the strict sense but that widely impacted day-to-day life. “Social forces there are; obvious in manifestation or detected by accident, subtle in working or terrific in explosion … but they are not yet brought within scientific description,” noted Franklin H. Giddings, chair of sociology at Columbia and a foundational figure in the field.14 The view of society Giddings promoted at Columbia centered on expanding its measurement. “Social forces,” once identified, could shed new light upon society’s operations. “A man is said to be doing well if he succeeds in a business venture, whereas the particular success is due in part to the prosperous conditions, a social force,” explained William F. Ogburn, at the time also affiliated with Columbia sociology. “When a man fails in business, his failure is interpreted in terms of personal inability, whereas the business crisis and depression—a social force—may be the cause.”15 The implications were obvious: better understanding of the forces themselves not only provided more sympathetic readings of social phenomena but also could better coordinate action and might even protect against fiasco.

What later came to be known as “social indicators” research presents another iteration of the growing power of macrolevel forms of knowing. Beginning in the mid-1800s, American reformists began using statistics to argue for the necessity for social interventions. Statistical information gathered about problems such as crime, poverty, and alcohol use was then employed to develop “a condition of society involving collective responsibility rather than an unfortunate or reprehensible condition of individual persons.”16 Early social indicators research helped to identify the general trajectory of society, as well as its less desirable aberrations, in order to shape both activist and policy action. It was governmental in all senses of the word: it became the tactics of the state and its reformers, but it was also used to instill a sense of norms and aspirations within the people themselves.17

A scientific, statistically grounded understanding of society focused on the measurement of social action, and a distillation of large-scale processes epitomized trend-oriented ways of thinking, as strongly underscored by a major study of American society published in 1933 and fittingly named Recent Social Trends. Commissioned by President Herbert Hoover in 1929, the fifteen-hundred-page study, funded by a $560,000 Rockefeller grant, was the result of years of work by a team of social scientists, including Charles E. Merriam, founder of the Social Science Research Commission; Alice Hamilton, the first female faculty member at Harvard; and Wesley C. Mitchell, one of the founders of the National Bureau of Economic Research. Nearly thirty chapters across two volumes surveyed society from an exhausting range of different angles—population, technological invention, occupational patterns, education, racial and ethnic groups, the family, leisure, religion, the arts, consumption, and more. “The Committee’s procedure … has been to look at recent social trends in the United States as interrelated,” read the report’s introduction, “to scrutinize the functioning of the social organization as a joint activity.”18

While the report was criticized for its expense, tardiness, and lapses (most egregiously, its failure to anticipate the Great Depression), it was also praised for providing a never-before-seen panorama of social life. As John Dewey wrote in a 1933 review, “We are undergoing a great disturbance of social equilibrium, and that the present great social problem, affecting all lines of social activity, is the problem of coordination and integration. There is nothing startlingly new in this conclusion. … But none the less to have assembled the material from every facet of our many-sided social life which supports in detail the generalization, to have given the only comprehensive picture of the resulting confusion, and clear-cut depiction of the whole problem is a great service.”19 In Dewey’s view, to gather a surfeit of social information was not only to ascertain more meaningful and representative truths about society’s currents and dilemmas but also to present sharper tools for chipping away at modern problems.20 “The social sciences were imbued at their inception with a new understanding of history and with high expectations of modernity,” explained Dorothy Ross in her now-classic history of the genesis of American social sciences. The guiding edict of the social sciences was the “future of modern society,” and properly used, they could bring about social advances.21 Recent Social Trends not only supplied a total picture of a rapidly shifting society but also created a means of making inferences about the days ahead. Ogburn, who served as director of research for the President’s Research Committee on Social Trends, said of the report, “The very term trend suggests the future. … [W]hen a study of trends of the immediate past is made for purposes of planning and policies, the attention is focused at once on the future.”22 Understanding the future as a terrain susceptible to careful intervention, the report’s trends became ways to talk about, represent, and exert technocratic control over the future.

Despite its shortcomings, Recent Social Trends made clear how trends could be used in the...