Author(s): Bernard Salt

Business

Baby bust. Environmental blasphemy. The hotness delusion syndrome. These are just some of the intriguing new phenomena this next decade may yield. The past decade has provided us with a lot of fodder for prognostications - with Facebook and Twitter coming up from nowhere to suddenly dominate the culture, the iPhone's complete transformation of communication and the WikiLeaks new world order, this decade has yielded much that would have been unthinkable in the once-futuristic-sounding year 2000. So what will 2020 look like? Will an iPhone-esque gadget be our main portal to the outside world? Will the boomers be receding gracefully from their dominant perch over the culture? Will the term 'friend' still mean the same thing? Will the new blasphemy look more like forgetting to bring your re-usable coffee cup to the neighbourhood cafe? Most importantly, will the convergence of all these new technologies create a merging of all the aspects of Australians' lives, resulting in The Big Tilt? A witty and animated examination of the decade to come.