Rumors of our death....
Library Link of the Day offers an interesting, if superficial, photo essay on Public Library architecture in the age of Google (in Slate). Nice eye candy for bibliophiles. Seattle's Koolhaus is there (how could it not be?). Salt Lake City's Library-cum-shopping mall is as well, though not Vancouver's similarly-Galleria inspired homage to the Coliseum (my image of which decorates this post). I suspect the latter predates the former in the race to build shopping into every dimension of life.
The Slate article references Ross Dawson's Trends in Living Networks, and in particular a post on an extinction timeline that predicts the demise of a variety of familiar elements of life:
2009: Mending things
2014: Getting lost
2016: Retirement
2019: Libraries
2020: Copyright
2022: Blogging, Speleeng, The Maldives
2030: Keys
2033: Coins
2036: Petrol engined vehicles
2037: Glaciers
2038: Peace & Quiet
2049: Physical newspapers, Google
Beyond 2050: Uglyness, Nation States, Death
Our predicted demise may be softened somewhat by the soon-to-follow death of copyright. And while death makes the list, where are taxes??? Do Democrats prevail after all? Physical newspapers last as long as Google? And I (think) I just got the 'speleeng' joke.
Looking at the more detailed timeline... is there any link between 'spam' and 'Microsoft' disappearing at the same time? :-)
Also, where would you place universities in this list?
Posted by:Andy Powell | March 05, 2008 at 06:24 AM