Foresight

Join us for our next What the Future complimentary webinar where we will (mostly) fight through our dystopian urges and shine a light on the efforts some people and brands.

As life becomes more complex, people are looking for more control in how they define, express and reflect their identity. In this What the Future: Identity issue, we reveal which forces influence who we are and what brands to media should know about representing and reflecting us in the future.

How do we express our identities? According to the Ipsos Future of Identity survey, fashion and appearance fall below foundational factors such as how we treat others. Hollywood costume designer and stylist Leesa Evans hopes for a future where we will use fashion to feel confident and authentic.

The Annenberg Inclusion Initiative is a global think tank at the University of Southern California that studies inclusion in all forms of entertainment. Program Director Katherine Pieper explains why holding media companies to account for inclusive representation is worth it, and how that could shape and reflect everyone in the future.

Will 3D-virtual communities and the metaverse lead to more tightly defined social bubbles? Or will they allow us to connect with people who we wouldn’t be able to meet? Sébastien Borget, who is building one of the leading decentralized virtual gaming worlds, hopes for the latter.

In virtual spaces we are able to craft digital representations of ourselves as avatars. But will we want to make an avatar for every platform we use? Timmu Tõke founded Ready Player Me to create an avatar engine meant to be portable across platforms.

Identities are complex to form, hard to define and increasingly easier to steal and fake. Author Tracey Follows explains how will we define ourselves and what happens to our legacy identities as they drift through time and space?

People seem to be isolating themselves into community bubbles of thought and ideas in media, online and at home. Journalist Dante Chinni analyzes the data and reports on the ground about how our political identities shape and are shaped by our physical landscape.

People think of identity as something we’re born with but also how they express themselves.