Yesterday a friend was telling me that she had discovered, to her chagrin, that many young people she knows — people in their early 20s — do not recognize the word “Holodeck”. For those of us who were around when Star Trek the Next Generation was on the air, such cultural ignorance can seem shocking.<\/p>\n
After all, the Holodeck was, for an entire generation, a kind of shorthand for “the future”, and in particular of the limitless possibilities of technology. In the fantasy world of STtNG it was a virtual environment that enables its to users experience, with full sensory immersion, any virtual reality at all. What could be a more perfect embodiment of “the future”, with its promise of endless possibility?<\/p>\n
I pointed out to my friend that to young people today, such a fantasy is, in a sense, quite retro. The 1980s ideal of virtual reality, exemplified by Jaron Lanier interacting with imaginary worlds through his VPL goggles and cybergloves, was in fact a kind of technological successor to the 1960s fantasy of a drug induced utopia. Or, in the words of Marshall McLuhan as channeled by Timothy Leary: “Turn on, tune in, drop out.”<\/p>\n
Today the ideal of entering one’s own personal imaginary world has been passed over. Rather, the compelling vision for young people is now of a shared<\/i> virtual world, a world in which people who are far apart can use technology to join together in a massively shared experience that is not constrained by mere geography or physics.<\/p>\n
This concept of people coming together in cyberspace, of some advanced technology permitting geographically separated people to experience a group mind, did indeed exist in the fantasy world of STTNG. But back then it was seen as the very essence of corruption, of horror, of all that could go wrong in a world of technology run amok. It was technology as Destroyer, as bringer of soul-sucking spiritual death and mindless despair.<\/p>\n
A difference in perspective which is reflected in word choices. For example, we now call such a concept “Social Networking”. Back then, they called it “The Borg”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Yesterday a friend was telling me that she had discovered, to her chagrin, that many young people she knows — people in their early 20s — do not recognize the word “Holodeck”. For those of us who were around when Star Trek the Next Generation was on the air, such cultural ignorance can seem shocking. … Continue reading “Beyond the Holodeck”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10512"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10512"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10512\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10513,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10512\/revisions\/10513"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10512"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10512"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10512"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}