Edinburgh International Book Festival

I’m off to Edinburgh on Friday to speak at the Edinburgh festival (12.30 Saturday, Garden Theatre). I’m inclined to somehow weave in the following quote.

“Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end,… We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.”

Henry David Thoreau

Interesting thoughts relating to this here.

Retail Trends

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In my new book Digital Vs. Human (buy here) I featured a ‘future flash’ about a new kind of store. Seems someone has beaten me to it. Here’s my fictional flash…

1 June 2020
I’ve been thinking about shops, partly because I remembered what Theodore was saying about retailers generally missing the point about why people go shopping. He suggested that people partly shop to get out of the solitude and boredom that is their own home. Shopping is therefore, in varying degrees, social and is often more about the other human beings people meet and interact with than the things they buy.Historically, shopping was once very social. Half of all London shops once took in lodgers and many, if not most, Parisian shops were located beneath flats or inside houses.

So here’s my idea for a new kind of shop. It would be called 5 Things to Change Your Life. Each month the shop would curate 5 items that could change someone’s mind about something. For example, several copies of Dark Side of the Moon on Vinyl, a bottle of Chateau d’Yquem 1976, a dozen well thumbed copies of The Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Cherry-Garrard a pepper grinder that works properly and 48 hours of total silence at a monastic retreat.

But here’s the thing. The shop would openly seek conversations with its customers encouraging them to visit the shop to explain their choices to others. We would explain each item’s history and provenance, even providing the contact details of previous owners. The shop would also host events, including poetry readings, live music, cookery demonstrations and art exhibitions. And it would help people to exchange skills, find jobs and even marriage proposals too?

What do you think? Stick with Amazon?

Best, Nick.

And here’s the fact.

Story is a 2,000 square foot store set on Manhattan’s 10th Avenue that takes it’s point of view from a magazine. Namely, it changes with every ‘issue’ – usually every 6-8 weeks. The store was set up by Rachel Shechtman and follows a particular theme, trend or idea each time it reinvents itself.

Story website and more details here.

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Quote of the Week… and much, much more

So much to think about at the moment, which is why I’ve been rather absent of late. I’m working on something looking at the future of water, some provocation cards for a Tech Foresight 2016 event and something on risk for London Business School.

But more interesting than all of this is something I heard on the radio this morning. Don’t even ask why I was listening to Katy Perry but I was and a song called Part of Me came on. One of the lines was:

“I just want to throw away my phone away. Find out who is really there for me.”

Normally I wouldn’t pay much attention to this, but there’s another song I heard not so long ago by James Blunt with the line:

“Seems that everyone we know’s out there waiting by a phone wondering why they feel alone.”

And last week someone was telling me how students at an art college had abandoned ‘digital installations’ in favour of painting and drawing. Are we seeing some kind of rebalancing emerging here?

Oh, the quote…

“If we allow our self-congratulatory adoration of technology to distract us from our own contact with each other, then somehow the original agenda has been lost.
” – Jaron Lanier.

C’mon Aussies C’mon…

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OK, it’s Brisbane, but you have to start somewhere….BTW, bumped into Prof. Susan Greenfield today in London. She’s off to Brisbane tomorrow. Is Brisbane the center of the universe or what?

BTW, here’s a link to ABC Radio’s Future Tense about Digital Vs.Human (about 10 minutes, but worth listening to the other two people too).

Podcast link right here.

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Where’s Watson?

If you are Brisbane based I’m at the Avid Reader bookstore (193 Boundary St) tonight 6.30-8.00pm. I’m then back at the Sydney Writers’ Festival Thursday & Friday for a couple more events (9.30pm Thursday late night salon conversation with Yanis Varoufakis and Starlee Kline and then 11.30am Friday panel session with T.L. Uglow and PJ Voght called ‘Should we delete the internet?’). Friday night I’m out on the town if any Sydney based readers fancy a beer (probably the bar at Alpha in Castlereigh St from about 8pm).

What happens to learning when your teacher is an app?

Screen Shot 2016-05-05 at 14.55.27Nice book extract (on education) in the Australian Financial Review.

About a ten-minute read. Click here for article.

Here’s how it starts…

It has never been easier to give the illusion of intelligence. If you know the right people to follow, or the right publications to plunder, you can cut and paste your way to instant academic credibility. I’m doing it right now. This idea isn’t mine, but comes instead from a 2014 New York Times article called “Faking Cultural Literacy”.

The article argues, correctly in my view, that we live in an era where our opinions are increasingly based on very little knowledge.What matters is not knowledge itself, but knowledge of the fact that a thing exists or is happening. Who needs to take time learning about something when we can just skim Twitter? We’re all busy people, after all.