I don’t know much about Dunedin’s position (currently) or its future prospects, but the ‘business as usual’ approach is, in the long run, inevitably a dead end (unless we assume nothing will ever change).

Here in Christchurch we are constantly being told (by those who think they know) that we have to ‘let go of the past’ and head off in new directions – yet the government is approaching the rebuild in a remarkably conservative manner. It just seems to want businesses and property owners to keep making decisions on the same – short-term – basis they always have and not to use the immense powers it has voted itself (via CERA) to show some real vision and guidance.

Having said that, I wouldn’t want to overestimate the potential ‘virtual’ aspect of the consequences of modern technologies (that you highlight in the link). While no doubt a lot of current practices will be displaced by the ‘virtual’ – e.g., in education – if only for economic reasons, my hunch is that the main future consequence of the kinds of technologies (and environmental threats) that are emerging is yet to come into clear focus.

I suspect, in fact, that one of the main effects of widespread communication technologies will be a deepening of local (‘non-virtual’) experience and connectivity. (I should add that ‘deeper’ does not necessarily mean ‘better’, here.)

Here’s an example of what I mean: when we, even now, have a videoconference my sense is that the main ‘action’ actually happens prior to, and after, the ‘interconnected’, globalised ‘hook-up’. That is, each isolated group gets together and frames (beforehand) and interprets (after the event) the process that they are (or have just been) involved with. The videolink is – as Erving Goffman put it – the ‘front stage’. The real action will remain at the ‘back stage’. I think that’s something that many futurists fail to realise. People ‘use’ technologies in more ways than what the technologists anticipated. (For example, far from using cellphones for ‘communication’, I text, now, often to avoid more elaborate forms of social interaction – and I don’t think I’m the only one!)

People aren’t silly. Facebook is a performance venue, principally, it is not a means of ‘keeping in touch’ (well, it is – but it’s ‘keeping in touch’ through an attenuated ‘performance’. I’m amazed how ‘low cost’ it is, for example, to ‘show concern’ via texting. Concern used to be so much more costly!).

The ‘real action’ is when – in real time – we talk to each other about, or reflect upon in private, what we said/posted/read/chatted about on facebook. The main consequence won’t stem from what happens within the virtual. It’s how these new technologies will affect those zones of ‘real action’ that will generate the most important consequences for the future … I think.

Anyway, just idle thoughts – based on my assumption that humans will remain humans, no matter what the (external) technologies.

Thanks for the comment and link. Yes, the whole issue of priorities is a big part of it, but what makes it worse for me is that John Key’s government is supposedly so big on ‘prioritising spending’ in ‘tight financial times’.

Bill English spoke – somewhat depracatingly – of “nice to haves” around about the time of the last budget (I think). But here we have Key talking about how a “nice to have” is really something we should ‘aspire to have’.

It’s inconsistent – and suggests a kind of ‘run with the hounds and hunt with the hares’ kind of discursive switching.

http://www.odt.co.nz/opinion/opinion/46073/why-future-doesn039t-need-stadiums

Building stadiums right now is like buying a 50″ flat screen to celebrate being made unemployed. We have higher priorities and greater needs.

But John is happy to stick a couple of bucks on everyone’s prescription while spending on stadiums shows an amazing grasp of priorities.

One – paradoxical (or is that ‘ironic’?) – endpoint of the approach being taken is that it may well be that developments in the older suburbs (such as this one in Woolston) may come to be the places that generate the ‘character’ of a new city and draw the loyalties of those who had previously at least resisted the allure of suburban shopping malls.

That would leave the central city in pretty much the same doldrums it was heading towards prior to the earthquakes – an opportunity would have been not just missed but deliberately side-stepped.

I agree that the main hope probably rests with that sub-set of the business-owners who ‘get it’.