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Related: near-future tag

In the tag description and the previously linked question it appears that only covers technological advancement.

Do we want to include social, political and cultural change as well?

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  • $\begingroup$ I think it should be fine, as long as the question is also tagged politics or culture and so on, as appropriate. $\endgroup$
    – cobaltduck
    Jan 14, 2016 at 20:47

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The tag wiki:

For questions concerning the immediate future, where technology is assumed to have advanced slightly while still recognizable to modern humans.

This, to me, covers anything that happens in a future with better technology than we have now. I think it would cover the changes you've listed, though it may appear misleading, especially when "social, political and cultural change" has occurred independent of technological advancement.

Maybe we could replace 'technology' with 'society', which to me sounds like a superset.

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  • $\begingroup$ I agree on this point. The tag doesn't need to be specific about every aspect of human existence, especially since most questioners are asking about a reasonable cap to their fanciful whimsies. $\endgroup$
    – Jon
    Jan 6, 2016 at 0:32
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To summarize what i wrote in chat:

The near future tag makes most sense for technological advances. It is supposed to describe situations where available tech is pretty much like we have it now, with only small changes.

Since technological advance has to happen in steps, each building on the former, this is a sensible setting.

Society, politics and culture not only can change in any direction any time, they are not uniform, either. This is especially visible in not so strongly developed countries, where culture differs strongly even between the cities and the countryside of the same country. Of course this effect is even stronger if you look for example at the Koreas: very close together spatially, but they could hardly be more defferent politically and socially.

While some changes in societies happen very gradually, like for example the women's rights movements in western countries, or enlightenment (in some western countries ;-) ), others happen quite radically. Think of the rise of fascist dictatorship in germany, and the even faster decay of the socialist / communist society around the reunion of east and west germany.

Also, if you look at for example turkey or malaysia, both are countries that nowadays are more religious and more socially strict than they were 40 years ago.

So, for society, politics and culture, the amount of time that has passed from today to the future will most likely have a divverent effect than time has on technology.

Conclusion

For technology, the aspect of near-future is important, while for the other three, it is far less so. So i vote to stick to technology for this tag.

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    $\begingroup$ Societal/economic/etc changes that are a direct consequence of the tech change, though, should be in-scope. A question about how people behave when every action they take is geocoded and stored, for example, would fit the tag. $\endgroup$
    – Monica Cellio
    Jan 5, 2016 at 17:26
  • $\begingroup$ @MonicaCellio but then the reason for the tag is still the tech (as a driver for the societal change), is it not? $\endgroup$
    – Burki
    Jan 8, 2016 at 15:45

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