Guess what the word of the year is in Davos. Deflation? Pandemics? Inequality? Nope. The unofficial word of the year, plastered over the program of the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in the Swiss Alps, is … context.
The title of the 2015 annual meeting is The New Global Context. Extending the theme, there are multiple sessions on The New [fill in the blank] Context, including banking, business, Latin America, Japan, digital, China, energy, and growth. And if The New Context starts getting old, you can go to a session about the future context of health care.
Why is 2015 the year of context? The organizers helpfully explain in the dramatic, yet carefully neutral language for which Davos is known: "Complexity, fragility and uncertainty are potentially ending an era of economic integration and international partnership that began in 1989. What is clear is that we are confronted by profound political, economic, social and, above all, technological transformations. They are altering long-standing assumptions about our prospects, resulting in an entirely ‘new global context’ for decision-making.”
Context is a safe word for Davos because it is devoid of meaning while bearing intellectual buzz. (Jacques Derrida: “There is nothing outside context.”) The word offends no one, with no risk that events will render it outdated once the programs are printed. The downside is that it doesn’t exactly draw a crowd. That may be why the Ebola folks chose to be more direct, calling their session Confronting the Challenge of Catastrophic Outbreaks.
The New Global Context seems to be as all-encompassing as a title could be, but a pair of scientists went the organizers one better. On Saturday, the program promises, “Nobel Laureate in astrophysics Brian Schmidt and cosmologist Lawrence Krauss explore the unfathomable scale of the universe and humanity's place within it.” The title of their session, no doubt written tongue in cheek: The Galactic Context.
