[From ZDnet’s Tech Broiler blog]
Retail in 2021: When clicks have buried bricks
Summary: Ten years from now, virtually all shopping will take place at home.
By Jason Perlow | November 29, 2011
Edgewater, New Jersey.
Mindy Konsumer was in waking sleep when she heard the sound of birds tweeting. They progressively got louder, and louder and louder.
She pulled the covers over her head. “Ugh. Why did Josef set it to those horrible birds again instead of my wind chimes?”
“Bitch, deactivate the alarm. I’m up.”
YES MINDY. GOOD MORNING. IT IS MONDAY, 8:30AM, THE 29TH OF NOVEMBER, 2021. SHALL I PRIME THE ESPRESSO MAKER NOW, OR SHALL I WAIT UNTIL YOU EXIT THE SHOWER?
“Prime me my standard double right now, Bitch. I’ve got some shopping to do first.”
YES MINDY. DOUBLE ESPRESSO, DOUBLE STRENGTH WITH EXTENDED BREW TIME. ONE SPLENDA.
Mindy was always cranky in the mornings. The first time Josef brought in their first Apple Siri iHome automation system and it woke her up it really pissed her off.
She’s been calling it “Bitch” ever since. The intelligent agent could care less now, but it originally asked her if she was upset. Now it was simply routine.
And at age 50, while she was exceptionally perky and fit, Mindy wasn’t getting any younger. Or patient. God, she hated the holidays.
Josef, her husband, had already woken up about an hour earlier. She walked out of the bedroom and past his office, where he was staring at the data streaming on his 4K wall displays and was barking orders on a three way conference call with the home office in Beijing and his traders in Mumbai. Read more on Retail in 2021: When clicks have buried bricks…
Call: Travel and Imagination
Travel and Imagination [1]
Edited by: Garth Lean, Russell Staiff and Emma Waterton (University of Western Sydney, Australia)
Like so many words associated with tourism, ‘imagination’ is an accepted though somewhat obdurate notion. We accept it because it is, after all, something that is central to our consciousness and perception, operating almost imperceptibly whether we are awake or asleep. But beyond this, imagination also takes up an endlessly complex form because the term is linked to a constellation of other phenomenon: dreams, make-believe, fantasy, memory and remembering, perception, the ‘mind’s eye’, understanding, world-views, learning, story-telling – in all its many forms – and so forth. It’s a shape-changing phenomenon and it’s utterly central to the human experience. Given this, we see it as a concept key to both our everyday lives and the idea of travel and tourism, producing both ‘imaginative travel’ and the ‘travel imagination’. Surprisingly, however, there is a dearth of published material focusing upon the links between the two.
This Call for Papers is an attempt to ‘plug’ the abovementioned gap and open up new and innovative explorations of travel and imagination. It seeks contributions that illustrate how imagination becomes a part of, informs, is informed by and/or is represented as an element of travel. Crucially, travel should not be read here as something that is limited to a conceptualisation centred on the ‘experience’ itself, but to any temporal and spatial boundaries the writer wishes to set. Read more on Call: Travel and Imagination…