Genius Steals is doing some more work with Marriot folllowing our series on the future of travel with Fast Company.
The final piece was a future facing musing on the possible impact of virtual travel. It was one of my favorites, since it let us think about how technology and media and people and the future interact.
One way to explore ideas is to push things to logical extremes.
In this instance, assuming infinitely better mediation technologies, infinite bandwidth, and every object and pair of eyes or contact lenses IP enabled and streaming, you could take an immediate vacation into the life of any other person on the planet.
Not quite being John Malkovitch, but certainly seeing it.
Every lifestream becomes a television station.
Reality TV becomes real life. 7 billion channels and nothing on. Real violence and sex, trending lives, seen through the screen. Everyone is a voyeur, a lifejacker, everything is public and permanent, and the more viewers on your stream, the more attention you can assemble, the more value your life.
The ability to aggregate attention in an infinite space becomes the only way to guage the relative value of any quantum of content, if it isn't already, and everyone is a media company.
You can read Traveling Without Moving and let me know what you think.
Now we are excited to be judging the Marriot Travel Brilliant Innovation Contest, since innovation and travel are things very close to the heart of Genius Steals.
You can enter your ideas to make travel more awesome on the Travel Brilliantly site and win the chance to bring that idea to life, whilst being pampered by Marriot.
Best of luck.