1. “Binge watching” will be replaced by “disgust previewing.”
In 2013, we bragged to each other that we wasted entire weekends watching “Breaking Bad,” “Game of Thrones,” and Netflix-produced, all-at-once releases like “House of Cards” and “Orange Is the New Black.” But that’s going to change in 2014. Tracy Maxwell-Heath, a media scholar at Columbia who is writing a book about how people who go back and forth between Hulu, Netflix, and Amazon Prime are more likely to try to melt Pristiq on a spoon with a lighter than people who go back and forth between Facebook and their inboxes, foresees a new kind of viewing in 2014. “People will start streaming a show, watch for a few seconds, then turn it off in disgust,” Maxwell-Heath says. “They’ll say to themselves, ‘I get it. I know. There’s going to be bad stuff and surprises and affairs. I’m actually going to care. I’m going to tweet smart opinions. Someone on Facebook will comment, “No spoilers!” and someone else will comment, “LOL, love ya, Kim!” And the show will end, and I will be right back here in this chair. Waiting to die.’ ” Maxwell-Heath admits that, yes, disgust previewers may very well watch anyway. But, she promises, “The disgust preview will always happen first.”
2. If 2013 was the year of the tiny house, 2014 will be the year of the (teeny) tiny garage.
Shelia Watkins was miserable, broke, and recently laid off from her job at a university library when, dining at a local Arby’s, two days after Christmas, she happened to read that Kanye West had given his infant daughter a tiny Lamborghini. Within hours, she had teamed up with investors who agreed: “Kanye is a genius. People worship him. Everyone’s getting a teeny, tiny car. And they’ve got to park them somewhere.” Orders for her custom-designed teeny, tiny garages—Watkins took shop in high school—have already started streaming in. Watkins, a petite blonde who will only admit to being in her “mid-fifties,” is fully aware that she can’t keep up with demand. So she’s offering a webinar entitled “Start a Business Building Teeny, Tiny Garages.” Kanye himself is delighted: “It used to be that business moved at the speed of light. Then, business moved at the speed of my mouth. In 2014, business will just move when I Instagram shit. And at the speed of my mouth.”
3. “Slow food” and 3-D printing will combine.
“2013 was the year when people were saying to each other, ‘What’s slow food?’ ‘What’s 3-D printing?’ ” says Martha Witbeck, the director of the North Carolina-based think tank Zebracock, which focusses on innovations based on conversations people have when they’ve consumed enough alcohol to make them curious and engaged, but not so much that staring out the window isn’t also reasonably entertaining. “2014 is the year when you’ll get this cross-section of people who know what 3-D printing is who also know what slow food is. And it is just a matter of time before one of those people will be like, ‘You know, you can make a coq au vin in one of these things, and you don’t really have to put those little X marks on the pearl onions, because, let’s face it, nobody gives a shit.’ ”
4. Helicopter parenting, so long reviled, will finally be replaced—by “shotgunning-a-beer” parenting.
Sounds a little extreme, right? Well, not according to Jasper Lambsharkssen, a child psychiatrist in private practice and the author of the forthcoming book “Because I’m Older Than You, Because You Have the Brain of a Squirrel, and Because I Fucking Said So: Why Being Friends with Your Kids Is Dumb.” “We’re not advocating this for children whose primary experience has been proper parenting,” Lambsharkssen stresses. “We are introducing shotgunning-a-beer parenting only as an antidote to extreme instances in which a parent has already established poor boundaries with the child.” Here’s how shotgunning-a-beer parenting works. Your kid wants you to call a teacher to change a grade, or to drive him to an oboe lesson, or to cut his meat—something that you would have previously jumped at the chance to do. Instead of saying yes, you immediately shotgun a beer. That’s it! “It’s so important, at this point, for your child that you, A, teach him that he is not the center of the universe, B, be a positive role model of an adult taking care of your own needs, and C, show him that sometimes people will do things he doesn’t like,” Lambsharkssen says. “Shotgunning-a-beer parenting is going to explode as parents discover that it’s the simplest way to take care of a complicated problem.”
5. Political lines will cease to divide Americans, who will separate themselves into two camps—those who have tickets to Britney Spears’s show in Vegas and those who have no idea who she is.
Weirdly, this will be a trend in three acts. Act I: as the divide becomes publicized, it will cease to exist as such, and will become instead a divide between those who have gone to the show and those who haven’t. Act II: things quiet down for a while as roughly half the country grudgingly makes its way to Vegas to see the show. Act III: the divide resurfaces, more polarizing than ever, because, at this point, it’s between the people who think the show sucked and the people who thought it was an interesting choice for a popular but often critically overlooked pop icon. Sure beats fighting over Obamacare, right? Dennis Buttersby, also of Zebracock, isn’t so sure. He’s concerned that there might be rioting in Vegas. “Studies demonstrate unequivocally that free cocktails exponentially increase the chance of violence in arguments about feminine agency,” he says. But what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, right?
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