In 1999, Rolf Jensen was a professor at the Copenhagen Institute of Futures Studies when he wrote one of the most prescient essays about the new millennium that no one’s heard about. The essay was called The Dream Society: How the Coming Shift from Information to Imagination Will Transform Your Business.

In little more than 200 pages, Jensen captured the design-thinking, purpose-driven zeitgeist our 2017 world is beginning to embrace.

“Companies will need to understand that their products are less important than their stories. And storytellers — specialists in the art of conveying human emotions — will need to have a voice in the design process. Designers and engineers may abandon even the most ingenious technical enhancements, if those enhancements can’t be integrated into a product’s story.

“Storytelling will even affect the way companies hire and retain employees. Companies will recruit people based on how they express their spirit. Marx may have been right: In an ideal society, employees will own the means of production — in their heads and in their hearts.”

The Stories We Tell Vs. The Stories We Live

There are some brands out there that just get it. We identify with them so deeply that they don’t just represent a product that we consume or a service we use, they represent our core selves.

What is it, for example, that makes a brand like Disney so intrinsic to the American identity, versus another pioneering animation studio like Dreamworks?

It’s all in the emotional world they build and the story they help their audience tell about themselves.

The addictive quality of the Disney brand is no accident. The creative geniuses in their marketing department understand the importance of infusing every touchpoint from their signature big-eyed animation style to the whimsical designs of their retail stores with a sense of innocence and joy. Disney knows that the safety and optimism of childhood are in-demand commodities in a world shadowed in danger and cynicism.

The problem is, while Disney imbues every customer interaction with its brand values of innocence and optimism, not all of their business practices reflect the same. The Walt Disney Company, which is the second largest broadcast and cable-media company in the world, has come under fire for its anti-union stance and unfair labor practices. It’s pretty hard to maintain a sense of innocence and optimism while scraping by on poverty-level wages working for “the happiest place on earth.”

How can a place as dedicated to reflecting its brand values in its marketing and customer relations as The Walt Disney Company fall so flat when it comes to its internal business practices?

According to Jensen, while massive entertainment companies like Disney deal in making dreams a reality, its corporate heart is a product of the Information Society, where numbers matter more than people.

Farewell, Information Society

Jensen observed that the twentieth century was characterized by the emergence of the Information Society, in which “knowledge becomes more important than capital,” and in which “numbers are better than words because they are concrete; they reflect measurable, physical realities.”

When our future grandchildren look back on our age, they will see it as dull and gray, dominated by technology and neglecting human values. They will understand that we today could not yet free ourselves from our narrow focus on work, which we viewed simply as a means to pay for consumable goods and leisure pursuits. They may, however, wonder what it was like to live at a time when life was divided into little boxes of either work or leisure.

In the Information Society, people who produced and measured and analyzed information were more valued than people who produced and worked with material goods.

In the Information Society, sectors that were historically the realm of scholarship and knowledge such as healthcare, government, education, and research were industrialized, automated, and sold as consumer goods subject to market demands.

But, Jensen contended, the Information Society by its very nature will render itself obsolete by the automation of computational services, thus carving out room for humanity to find value in ideas and stories over raw data.

The technologies allowing global communication — the Internet, direct broadcast satellites, etc. — will be taken for granted, and much more value will be placed on the content of that communication. For example, 500 television channels offering nothing but reruns of old shows will not be tolerated — people who can produce highly imaginative new programs will be in greater demand, as will innovative CD-ROM creators, musicians and composers, actors, artists, journalists, and other storytellers. Just as information manipulation is a valued skill in so many occupations today, storytelling will be a key skill in a wide range of professions, from advertiser to teacher to business entrepreneur to politician to religious leader — even to futurists. Each will be valued for his or her ability to produce “dreams” for public consumption.

Jensen asserted that the emerging new era, The Dream Society, will have more in common with hunter-gatherer societies than with the Industrial or Information ages in terms of thinking of oneself as part of a greater whole, finding meaning in the mundane, and using icons and mythology to create guideposts for navigating the world.

Modern Myths

We see these new guideposts in the internet memes we create, assign shared meaning to, transmit, and repurpose. If you’re a part of this new society, you can immediately recognize the shared meaning behind a picture of Kermit the Frog sipping tea and know the story it’s telling — even without text.

But that’s none of my business. Source: Know Your Meme

The joy and virality of memes come from the collective collaboration of a digital tribe finding new ways to express the meme while still observing its framework.

Memes have become the petroglyphs on the walls of the massive system of caves we call the Internet.