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THE RED TELEPHONE SEPTEMBER 2026: FEATURE ESSAY
Goat Tracks Across a Digital Landscape
If you choose to drive a car, you‘ll eventually end up stuck in traffic.
The Information Superhighway is a fraction of the Digital Landscape. Just as the freeway isn’t the land.
As more people spend more and more time in their little palace-on-wheels, they come to see this as the world and not just the view through the window screen.It’s an air conditioned micro-cinema appointed with every possible comfort, transporting them to and from a short menu of destinations.
I’ve spent most of my life in two major Australian cities, Melbourne and Hobart. It’s projected that over the next decade Melbourne will become the biggest city in Australia. The population of Hobart is, at around 250,000, is about 5% that of Melbourne. Mountainous Hobart wraps itself around the River Derwent, while Melbourne sits on flat plane from Port Philip Bay to the Dandenong Ranges.
Flat planes demand straight lines, the shortest distance from A to B. It’s said that one of the driving forces of New York’s success is that it simply plonked a grid down in the middle of Manhattan. A blank canvas ready for anything.
