Melinda Davis is the CEO and primary seer of The Next Group, a futurist think tank in New York, and has consulted to multinational corporations, venture capitalists, politicians, and pop culture icons. She is also a fiction writer and winner of a Pushcart Prize. She lives in New York City with her husband, Ealan Wingate.
Sherry Turkle<p>director, MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, Abby Rockefeller Mauze Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology, MIT<p>At mid-twentieth century, David Riesman argued that Americans had shifted from authentic inner direction to anxious, please-your-neighbor, outer direction. Davis suggests a troublesome turn of the wheel: We've come to the worst of both worlds at the dawn of the new millennium. We are anxiously turned inward -- the self is our central preoccupation -- and we want our relationships as well as our consumer products to help us heal! Arresting and absorbing, The New Culture of Desire provokes self-reflection: Are we really drawn to the marketers who convince us that their products offer corrective emotional experiences?