Will the future eat all our cultural objects?

March 27th, 2011, 10 Comments »

Twenty years from now, how different will our homes look? What cultural objects will be left? CDs have pretty much become curiosities already. DVDs are headed in the same direction.

And we’re finally getting serious about buying eBooks.

It’s easy to imagine a home in 2030 that contains no books, CDs or DVDs. In terms of cultural objects, that pretty much leaves visual art (and, I suppose, tchotchke and knickknacks), doesn’t it? What’s the future of paintings and sculpture? Science-fiction movies would have us believe that our television and walls are converging, so that any vertical surface will become a display. Will that happen? Will we just display, say, a rotating gallery of Picassos on our walls? Or maybe walls will host loops of family videos, or some future version of Facebook, so that the fall is awash in video, photos and text updates from friends and family?

I’d be more confident in that prediction if those digital picture frames had really caught on in a serious way, or if more of our fridges and bathroom mirrors already had video displays embedded in them. But, as they say, the future is always just around the corner.

In the future, will the amount of cultural detritus in a house reflect its owner’s age?

I, for one, really like how our books look in our bookcase. I’m loathe to thin them out when we move, or the bookcase gets too full. They are, as a friend says, excellent wallpaper.

Will your home still have cultural objects in it in 20 years?

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Want to Buy My Childhood Home?

August 27th, 2007, 8 Comments »

I grew up in West Vancouver. To most Vancouverites, that either implies that I was raised by my grandparents or in a Asian-owed, monolithic palace in the British Properties. In truth, I spent my youth in a wooded but very middle-class neighbourhood near the Cleveland Dam.

Yesterday my brother emailed me, because he noticed that our childhood home is up for sale. It’s an ordinary split-level, 2000 square-foot home and is now 51 years old. It’s got four bedrooms, 2.5 bathrooms and is on a fairly large lot which backs onto the forest. It’s about ten or fifteen minutes north of Park Royal:


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I’ll have to double-check, but I think my parents paid $75,000 (apparently they paid $96,000) for that house back in 1979. I’m not sure how much they sold it for in about 1992. Today, how much is the sale price?

$969,000. Really? Is that what a million dollar home looks like in Vancouver?

It’s about two blocks away from Collingwood School, which is a ritzy private school that’s probably driven up local property values. Still, though, that seems like an absurd amount of money for such an ordinary house.

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