Being there
CNN.com – Tech will cause a real estate crash – May 16, 2005
Entertainment and culture
A 60-inch high-definition TV with
5.1 channel surround sound can’t beat a live performance, but advances
in technology makes it much closer to the real thing than traditional
television. Your home theater will get any broadcast or performance in
the world via the Internet, on demand, any time you want.
Jakob Nielsen is a deeply annoying usability guru, although he had the sense to join forces with Donald Norman, who’s a far more interesting person. As in this article, he likes to give diktats without the underlying rationale, if any, and they’re often fairly obviously foolish.
This is the product of a company that clearly is not taking it’s own advice (their website says that they are headquartered in Silicon Valley, which is one of the most expensive places to live and work in the world).
It also goes against a basic fact of human nature—serendipitous interactions are deeply valued and powerful, and they largely happen as a function of the people you bump into—and the likelihood that expected increases in the cost of petroleum will cause Americans to live in higher rather than lower density areas.
I suspect that there will be a real estate crash, and it does follow the development of communications technology. So if one follows the fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc, perhaps the title is “correct,” but I doubt very much that either the causes or consequences described here are correct.