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The Houston Foresight community devoted a day to Scanning the Fringe for its 2018 Spring Gathering on April 14th. In part the motivation for the topic was my sense of how difficult it is to teach someone to scan for the fringe. In my view, most of us know it when we see it. We often point to artists, science fiction, and the lone blogger. Yes, but how do we incorporate that into our scanning? One thought is that perhaps scanning the fringe does not “fit” with regular scanning and is a separate activity.
As pre-work, we asked participants to bring a fringe hit with them to share in the opening session of the meeting. It was interesting how many of us futurists were concerned that we weren’t fringe enough. Maybe it’s a good thing that integrating into the mainstream. Or maybe we’re losing our edge? I think not, but rather it reflects the murkiness of the fringe concept. It’s a cool idea that we sorta breeze over. Then when asked, we’re really not sure!
In that opening hour of audience sharing, the following “sources of the fringe” from the participants’ items:
| Blogs | Listserves |
| Science fiction | Places/locations (physical geographies) |
| Virtual reality
|
Video (youtube, Alternative TV channel (Twitch Tv) |
| Bots | Movements (transhumanism, biohacking) |
| Fields/disciplines (consciousness studies) | Research Labs (DARPA) |
| Mainstrean pubs (Wired, NY Times) | People |
As a follow-up, it would be interesting follow up to dig into each of these. Which blogs, people, etc.? We had an interesting chat about whether mainstream publications really belonged as a source of the fringe. That got us into a discussion of the definition of fringe. My “favorite” was the idea of “outside the prevailing paradigm.” If one accepts that definition, then sources inside the paradigm (e.g., Wired and the NY Times) can indeed be sources of what’s on the outside. The following “aspects” of the fringe could be gleaned from this sharing session:
| It’s relative (one person’s fringe is another’s mainstream) | Subjective |
| A belief (you “see and feel” it) | It has staying power |
| 3rd standard deviation | Outside the existing paradigm |
| Contrarian | A little crazy |
| “Mainstream” rolls its eyes |
These aspects get to the “know it when you see it” concept. Next time we’ll look at highlights from the others sessions and see if we can get more insight into the fringe! – Andy Hines
[…] our scan hit sharing session, which I shared about last week, we jumped into the formal program. Let’s focus on where each […]