John Warriner from the Future Foundation, discusses the challenges and opportunities that disruptive technology presents for sport and recreation organisations.
How do we ensure, in the face of our acutely felt time-crunch and attention-deficit, that regular participation in formal sport and recreation is not the first thing to be wiped from the diaries of millions?
Open-minded thinking and creative action is needed to avoid the nightmare vision, forming fast, of a nation of chronically stressed, sedentary, city-locked, commitment-phobic, overweight, apathetic, disengaged British Idles.
In the Future Trends report, Future Foundation – the world’s leading consumer trends agency - presents five future trends to inform this thinking and action, alongside quantitative research from the proprietary nVision platform.
As austerity matures from an economic policy to an entrenched and definitive state of mind, the need to instil motivation on an individual level is more pressing than ever before.
Gone are the days of extensive top-down support. In the face of aggressive public spending cuts, a trend towards the mass privatisation of public spaces, and growing social inequality, citizens, empowered by necessity, are taking charge of their own progress towards their own goals.
With this growing sense of personal responsibility must come a new approach from sporting bodies. Priorities must be revised away from directing behaviour and towards assisting individuals in designing their own active regime and reaching for their own sporting ambitions.
This Future Trends report looks at five variations on this theme, exploring the technological, social and attitudinal changes happening right now which respond to feeling abroad that my sporting destiny is mine and mine alone.
Technology features heavily in this report, not only because a sustained dependence on networked devices is increasingly a defining characteristic of 21st century life on an individual and societal level, but in acknowledgement of the continuing debate over the meaning of this dependence for sport.
Certainly, technological change presents serious challenges for equal access to sport. Success in workplaces and classrooms of the future will increasingly depend on digital literacy, but, like any form of literacy, competency is highly contingent on educational resources and opportunities - and they are not evenly distributed.
If playing sport one day becomes inseparable from using tech, the divisive potential of new technologies will need to be addressed in wider policy or it risks hampering access needlessly.
But to focus on the potential pitfalls of a Sport 2.0 landscape is to let pessimism obscure the motivating, and inclusive, power of new technologies.
The Digital Revolution has, for example, produced an explosion of widely-accessible new apps and devices that allow consumers to monitor and streamline their athletic efforts, better keep track of their health and fitness and push for performance they can take pride in.
The Quantified Self trend has been simmering for a while now. This report explores the possibility of imminent breakthroughs that could propel the use of these tools to mainstream status. It will also bridge the demoralising gaps between not only the different segments of society, but between the bulk of us and the expensively-coached athletes whose excellence, though inspiring, often seems impossibly distant.
This report also looks at changes underway in the mediation of identity online, changes which will have a great impact on sport.
Trends in the format, scope and user base of sport are fundamentally tied to trends in the format, scope and user base of social media.
79% of social networkers who play sports on a daily basis agree with the statement “I like it when people acknowledge my posts on social networking sites”, compared to just 52% of those who don’t play sports at all.
No surprises there – social networking is, after all, a lot like athleticism – increasingly professionalised, highly communitarian, intimacy-seeking and performative activities taking place in public stadia.
In the report, we look at the ways in which the revolution happening right now in the behaviour of online tribes is having a direct and palpable impact on how and why people play sport now and in the years to come. This and much more.
There is a window of opportunity open, while the technologies and attitudes described in this report remain in their infancy, for sporting influencers to reform and re-skill, to address and inspire the next generation of sportspeople, professional and amateur, in their own emerging languages.
Both the Sport and Recreation Alliance and the Future Foundation are keen to hear about the ways in which sporting organisations and NGBs have been innovating to increase participation. Use #future4sport to join the debate on Twitter.
Please get in touch with Libby Jellie and the Alliance will look at promoting them.
Download the Future Trends report.
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