10 Years Challenge: what the social phenomenon of the moment told us

On Impactscool Magazine we talk about the future, but to do it in the right way, it is essential to be able to grasp the signals of the present and interpret the changes that are found today compared to the past. The “10 Years Challenge”, the phenomenon that has crowded the “bulletin boards” of our profiles, is slowly going out, but has left some questions and offered us some interesting insights, fueling the debate on our tomorrow. Waiting for a “10 Years Future Challenge” (who knows, we could launch it with Impactscool), we decided to focus on some aspects of this social challenge, close to the issues we face in this online journal.

Simple challenge or stratagem to get information about us? This is one of the questions that have arisen in many simple users but also researchers and experts in social media, technology and artificial intelligence. In fact, according to some, the collection of millions of “dated” photos may have been designed for the training of the algorithms for facial recognition, in order to make them able to identify a person even starting from a picture taken some time ago. Despite the prompt refutation of the top management of Facebook, which stressed that the challenge was born spontaneously by a meme created by users, the article written by Wired journalist Kate O’Neill, who first raised the doubt, has become viral in a short time. It must be said, however, that among experts, interviewed on the topic by many newspapers, there is more skepticism towards this “theory” of the plot: really Facebook would need the “10 Years Challenge” to get information about us? We do not have the answer, and some doubts remain.

The animalist and environmentalist tendency. If most of the photos posted on social networks had the same users, VIPs and not, wanting to show the changes in appearance and look of the last 10 years, a minority used the “10 Years Challenge” to launch a cry of alarm on the conditions of the planet and its inhabitants. The WWF, for example, focused on three “symbol” species: the African elephant, the rhinoceros and the lion, decimated by ivory hunting and poaching. Even environmentalists, however, have tried to exploit the opportunity to sensitize the social world on the urgent issue of climate change, publishing images (in some cases fake, it is right to say it, even if the message does not change) that testify the deterioration of the Earth: melting ice, deforestation and air pollution, just to name a few.

The technologies? There are innovations that have grown exponentially in the last 10 years due to diffusion, potential and impacts.

Even Impactscool has accepted the challenge, here is our “10 Years Challenge”:

To build the best possible future, we must learn to grasp the signs of the present and the trends that come from the recent past. The speed with which some changes take place, positive or not, requires a serious and profound reflection. Of course, it can not be a social challenge to solve the big questions about tomorrow, but surely some well-studied memes helped to move some consciousness (hopefully) and create a greater awareness of the impacts our actions have and will have on the world in which we live .