Social scanning: Improving futures through Web 2.0; or, finally a use for twitter

This article outlines the potential for “social scanning,” the practice of aggregating and analyzing publicly available content created by futurists and shared on blogs and other social software platforms, and explains how it could create value for professional futurists and their clients. The system would take content that is personal but not proprietary, and create new value from it by detecting larger, long-term patterns that individual users might not be aware of. It would create the means to better distribute credit for finding weak signals or emerging trends, and create new forms of professional credit for work that currently remains invisible. It would create goods that are useful to individual practitioners and the profession as a whole. Finally, it would serve as a foundation for collaborative research in a community of practice that is highly distributed.

Research highlights▶ Web 2.0 allows us to develop new approaches to scanning. ▶ Social scanning could improve scanning's efficiency and professionally visibility. ▶ It could help reveal community-wide sensing of new trends. ▶ It could improve our ability to grasp wicked problems and weak signals.