Outside of the field of future studies and foresight, a ‘trend’ isn’t a word or a concept that we interrogate the meaning of regularly, yet it is one that we are often exposed to. It seems to be taken at face value as a useful heuristic to decode the contemporary landscape and position ourselves strategically amid its churn – whether that might be businesses attempting to optimise their forward planning or individual endeavours to align with cultural imperatives to stay ‘trendy’. The term has come to occupy a bifold meaning. It is simultaneously an analytical instrument for decoding the future and a cultural instrument for situating oneself in the present.

The term ‘trend’ stems from the Old English ‘trendan’, which meant ‘revolving’. The word’s meaning evolved throughout the 16th century to represent a general course, often in relation to ‘natural elements like rivers or winds.’ In the 20th century, amid a burgeoning consumer culture, the meaning of trend expanded once again, from explicitly signifying change or direction to indicating something in vogue, whether a musical genre, a style, or a visual aesthetic.

Devon Powers, Professor of Communication at the University of Michigan and author of On Trend, describes trends as a concept that emerged to contend with modernity, but which became its consummate symbol instead. It was an era characterised by a sense of destabilising systemic change, a disorientation that the futurist Alvin Toffler described as ‘future shock’. A general obsession with temporality and the rate of change prevailed. Against this backdrop, boardrooms increasingly sought out mechanisms for identifying which uncertainties or unforeseen effects might be reducible. By pinpointing potential profit opportunities amidst conditions of deep change, the use and study of trends in both fashion and foresight practices became intimately concerned with economic relevance, a means through which businesses could tactically situate themselves against emerging developments and harness future demand. In this way, ‘trends’ were nestled firmly into popular and corporate vocabulary in the 1960s and 70s.

In both forecasting and fashion, the trend therefore became a foundational building block in the relationship between the business and the future. With the fashion industry revolving around commodities, the term began to denote a physical manifestation of change rather than describing the levers of change itself. As the concept of a trend travelled between industries, the notion of trend as an object and outcome slowly seeped into corporate and strategic understandings, weakening its analytical base. Cultural Researcher and Founder of ZINE Matt Klein describes how the meaning of the term ‘trend’ has fallen under an ever-widening umbrella: “I’ve noted years ago that we’ve come to conflate ‘trending’ with ‘trends’ – the colour of the day now stands in for more substantial shifts in human behaviour (once called “trends”).

Despite criticisms of trend analysis on the basis that it serves and reproduces a particular vision of the future organised around value optimisation and consumer capitalism, its value extends beyond its commercial application. By determining patterns that point to enduring shifts, valuable insights can be elucidated about the makeup of our culture, society and zeitgeist. A trend is therefore, fundamentally, an interpretative claim about the relationship between objects, behaviours and events across time. Welsh writer and cultural materialist Raymond Williams argued that cultural analysis involves identifying patterns and correlations behind cultural products that, on the surface, seem unrelated but, upon further interrogation, reveal insightful linkages that help form a temporally bounded zeitgeist, or, as he described it, ‘structures of feeling’. His understanding of culture as a perennially conflictual process was informed by a tripartite framework, with its forms locking horns with one another: a prevailing dominant culture, the lingering residues of a former culture, and the blossoming values and practices of an emergent culture. Recognising patterns of change and shifting sway between these different forms is therefore essential in the ability to grasp the potential future of culture. This same ontology and understanding of the dynamism of culture exists in trend analysis: the identification of signals of change and how this can show the potential trajectories of future developments.

Yet this emphasis on nuance and temporality seems to have been diluted in the contemporary, indiscriminate use of the term. A litany of spurious claims about which signals and cultural products indicate change has proliferated, with consumer fads, gimmicks and transient moments of virality folded into the trend lexicon. This complicates the already opaque nature of the term, resulting in descriptive diagnoses of the contemporary being conflated with the analysis of potential future developments, creating a myopia surrounding the value and process of trends. Short-lived oscillations do not necessarily constitute significant shifts that indicate a directional and systemic change.

Beyond ambiguity of definitions, the pervasiveness of algorithmic cultural mediation adds new questions vital to explore. What does it mean for the rigour of the term when it is adopted as a heuristic for a culture that is deemed, at once, inert and tumultuous? How do you extract tangible insights into the shifts underway when access and participation happen through recommendation systems? Algorithms should not just be understood as external forces acting upon popular culture but increasingly as its engine: the means to cultural relevance.

‘Trends’, as mediated to us via algorithms, feel disconnected from the deeper directional currents of change that the term used to signify. Girls with little microphones tell me over short-form media that physical media is back, that I should dig out my childhood iPod shuffle from the bottom drawer of discarded electronics. Meanwhile, cultural and political discourse operates through digitally mediated hyperdrive, capitalising on shortened attention spans – all through an algorithm designed to inform me of ‘what’s trending’. What appears to be a collective cultural movement – the return of physical media – may be little more than heightened visibility within a personalised algorithmic silo, producing a sense of disconnect from cultural movement as something that is broadly shared. Grazing passively on spoon-fed short-form content, rather than participating, ‘trending’ in this context serves as an instrument to situate the present, rather than to assess the future. This has significant implications for those who utilise trends to assess change.

Sixty-five percent of US adults under 30 get their news from social media platforms, consuming content from feeds rather than through active pursuit of information. The nature of algorithms – preferencing content around engagement metrics – provides an impetus for online creators to imitate ‘trending’ themes, saturating feeds with viral facsimiles, notably with the suffix of -core or -aesthetic now adhered to microtrends. These manifestations of fleeting relevance quickly fade into obsolescence once novelty has been exhausted, leaving the physical debris of discarded fads in plastic and polyester strewn across landfills.

Jason Farago, writing in the New York Times, describes culture as having undergone a shift – from being spoken about as something with velocity, with a dogged forward motion, to something stale and sluggish “to be nibbled at”. “Everything is recorded, nothing is remembered,” he laments. The position reflects a pervasive sentiment of disillusionment with a culture that is all performance and no substance, a self-consuming ouroboros of artefacts from the more certain past. Literary theorist Andreas Huyssen characterises this emerging tendency as ‘presentism’. Whilst we once fantasised the future, then fetishised the past, we are now engulfed by invisible algorithms which operate in the ‘eternal now’.

Tastemakers, whether editors or DJs, no longer occupy the dominant role in culture that they did in the 20th century. As that role has been relinquished to algorithms, intuition has been superseded by data, which is used to mould the products of cultural industries around their target audiences. In this new terrain, ‘trending’ becomes a shorthand for popularity, with this popularity entirely dependent on visibility. Invisible and yet ubiquitous, these algorithms operate like a technological divine providence, embedded in our daily lives and guiding our interactions with culture and politics. Relevance is now directly tied to visibility, driving further exposure and reinforcing a feedback loop, dubbed a ‘you loop’ by author Eli Pariser. Derived from training and archival data, this feeds off of our existing inclinations, dictating what is served back on the digital platter.

Professor of Communication at Cornell University, Tarleton Gillespie asks: “What does it mean that commercial mechanisms measure and make claims about the popular? When information intermediaries offer us the popular, is that a reflection of our wants or the manufacture of them?” The recursive nature of analysing culture through algorithmic systems presents a methodological crisis in adjudicating cultural information; if trend analysis becomes indistinguishable from monitoring visibility, it forfeits much of its usefulness in assessing patterns of sustained change. The modus operandi of recommendation systems, their construction from historical data and reflection of existing preferences, raises the question of whether this impacts our ability to identify cultural novelty and interpret significance. Beyond the diagnoses of cultural stagnation opined by critics, this has implications for the practice of trend analysis as well. If a trend is understood as an interpretative claim about the relationship between objects, behaviours and events across time, then the process of identification and the evidentiary basis from which trends can be inferred becomes increasingly confused by incommensurate algorithmic amplification and brash claims about what we should dedicate our attention to.

Speaking to FARSIGHT, Klein describes our interaction with culture as now abstracted: “mediated through code, auto tuned to remove the quirks and nuances of our humanity. The good bits are stripped.” To him, this dynamic is “a distraction at best. A cognitive trap at worst”. In our abnegation of culture to algorithms, he suggests our participation has become a step removed, resulting in a prevailing sense of disconnection: “Our engagement with culture is becoming an abstraction of it. We talk about movies without seeing them. We react to people’s reactions to news headlines.” Subcultures have been whittled down to aesthetics; we engage in emulation but stop short of participation.

“This is why things feel so devoid of life and meaning. We’re both more immersed yet less immersed,” Klein posits, suggesting that there is also an economic dimension to this dynamic, with journalists and commentators grappling with loss of budgets and the audiences financially constrained, limiting their capacity to engage in unique experiences. Given this lack of resources, it is no wonder culture is increasingly outsourced to free entertainment in the form of vertical content. Amidst this crisis of legibility, a cultural object or cultural dynamism cannot be understood or analysed as independent evidence of change – and analysis of trends must retain an interrogation and contextualisation of the forces and infrastructures through which culture is circulated.

Having offered the diagnosis, Klein sees the delineation between transient hype and durable change as the cure: “our humanity is needed to study our humanity. This is trainable but takes effort. Curiosity, empathy, tolerance of contradictions, ambiguity and unknowing become safeguards against overconfident, data-backed predictions.” The prevalent reactive thinking privileges the “fast, big and loud”, enabling what is prominent to be mistaken for what is significant, says Klein, leading him to argue for a counterweight: “A much more grounded and substantiated, big picture view of the world is required. Cross-disciplinary, slow, and reflective thinking will ground us.” This is a principle at work in Klein’s annual meta-analysis of the zeitgeist, his META Trends Report, which distils hundreds of trend forecasts and identifies the most prevalent ones, while also considering the sources’ biases and agenda, ultimately using this as a baseline by which to assess social shifts. He synthesises these perspectives to form an understanding of the ‘collective industrial psyche’, and an interrogation of that consensus.

In response to the suggestion that the changing means by which society consumes media and information complicates the use of trends as an analytic tool, Devon Powers acknowledges that the term has undergone a shift in meaning and does a different kind of work than it previously did. However, she stresses that trends should operate on different levels, rather than as an all-encompassing category. “There are clearly levels of trends, with some moving faster or slower, and some moving more widely than others”. What has changed, in her view, “is the much more prevalent discourse of trends, the accessibility of certain kinds of trend insight, and the speed and visibility of certain kinds of signals.”

To her, algorithms are a powerful tool in generating and identifying meaningful cultural change, which can be “a blessing and a curse”. The feedback loop can amplify certain signals and leave others disadvantaged, in a way that’s disconnected from their relative importance. Social media hosts a plethora of content that may not be trending but is still evidence of emerging social manifestations. She recognises “a relationship between algorithmic trends and broader, slower moving trends and macrotrends” but qualifies that “one is not a replacement for the other.” Firmly believing in the practice of trend insight, “especially when employed in creative, curious, and risk-taking ways”, she argues that the complexity of the contemporary doesn’t discount the value of trend insight as a practice, even though the changing cultural landscape requires greater attention to scale, duration and context when considering signals. This necessitates the training of a new skill: the ability to distinguish between signals that have simply been accelerated and those that form a part of a more sustained transformation.

Despite the pervasiveness of algorithms in our society and culture, they are also useful in surfacing signals. Algorithmic behaviour should therefore become an object of analysis itself – rather than a mechanism in which its outputs are uncritically presented as self-evident indicators of cultural gravity. This requires an arm’s length, remaining cognitively attuned to what signals are accelerated, which trends collapse into consumerism, and what other inconsequential movements are algorithmically amplified, serving only as an opportunity to make a quick buck through targeted marketing. In a terrain overflowing with surface-level narratives of ‘trending’ content, trend analysis must retain its original purpose as an interpretative practice and the definition grounded as a current of change, so the concept doesn’t break its banks. By discerning directional flows through awareness of bias and wider context, and by reasserting human agency and intuition, shifting the cogs of the eternal now and comprehending the future on a more profound level remain a more feasible practice.

---