When Star Trek: The Original Series hit our TV screens it had an optimistic future where most anything is possible. Man had harnessed technology, to achieve anything he wanted: transporters, talking computers with Artificial Intelligence, small discs that store libraries of data, weapons and sensors of enormous power, the diagnostic beds in sickbay. It inspired people with what it had to say and what it showed us. By showing a future that was not only probable but also possible, it inspired people to want to be a part of that future. While it hasn’t created any technological revolution, it has contributed to the notion that technology is not bad in and of itself.
The Next Generation took this even further with Holodecks, and new Medical and Engineering discoveries. Although, at the time of TOS most people believed we would colonise the Moon and planets within 30 years, by the time of TNG, it was already clear that this was not going to happen. But, the science was still usually an extrapolation of present day theories, so we could still dream it would work.
Now academics have compared Enterprise with TOS, some lamenting the need to bring the show’s outlook up to date. In an article for Tech Review, Henry Jenkins, director of the Program in Comparative Media Studies at MIT, observed that the new show has a fundamentally different vision to the technological utopianism in the original.
On Enterprise, Jenkins argues the “crew copes with bleeding-edge technologies: they don’t trust the transporter not to scramble their molecular data, the torpedoes miss their targets, the shields are on the fritz and the computers make c****y food. Starfleet is now a paternalistic bureaucracy. In short, the message is, we have seen the future and it doesn’t work.â€
Jenkins puts the change in outlook down to the fact that, “we now live, day in and day out, with technologies that have been shipped before being adequately debugged, which can shut themselves down or wipe our email archives without notice. The newer the technology, the less likely it is to do what it promises, and as for getting reliable service, forget about it!â€
There are frequent news stories today, about machines, hardware, and software that has been inadequately tested, whole production years of cars recalled to be refitted, computer operating systems released and then the customers asked to comment on any faults they discover.
I would take the analogy even further. Archer travels the world in order to choose the best linguist for his new ship, but when he comes to pick a doctor and a science officer, he has to settle for aliens. This clearly mirrors the kind of technological skills shortages that we have today.
Also, I think that the rot set in before Enterprise. Voyager was a state of the art starship; with cutting edge bio-neural gel packs that replaced some of the traditional circuitry. But what happened, half way into the first season, they developed a bacterial infection, and no replacements could be replicated. If you buy a new games consul when there are only 1000 in the country, this may sound familiar.
The Next Generation took this even further with Holodecks, and new Medical and Engineering discoveries. Although, at the time of TOS most people believed we would colonise the Moon and planets within 30 years, by the time of TNG, it was already clear that this was not going to happen. But, the science was still usually an extrapolation of present day theories, so we could still dream it would work.
Now academics have compared Enterprise with TOS, some lamenting the need to bring the show’s outlook up to date. In an article for Tech Review, Henry Jenkins, director of the Program in Comparative Media Studies at MIT, observed that the new show has a fundamentally different vision to the technological utopianism in the original.
On Enterprise, Jenkins argues the “crew copes with bleeding-edge technologies: they don’t trust the transporter not to scramble their molecular data, the torpedoes miss their targets, the shields are on the fritz and the computers make c****y food. Starfleet is now a paternalistic bureaucracy. In short, the message is, we have seen the future and it doesn’t work.â€
Jenkins puts the change in outlook down to the fact that, “we now live, day in and day out, with technologies that have been shipped before being adequately debugged, which can shut themselves down or wipe our email archives without notice. The newer the technology, the less likely it is to do what it promises, and as for getting reliable service, forget about it!â€
There are frequent news stories today, about machines, hardware, and software that has been inadequately tested, whole production years of cars recalled to be refitted, computer operating systems released and then the customers asked to comment on any faults they discover.
I would take the analogy even further. Archer travels the world in order to choose the best linguist for his new ship, but when he comes to pick a doctor and a science officer, he has to settle for aliens. This clearly mirrors the kind of technological skills shortages that we have today.
Also, I think that the rot set in before Enterprise. Voyager was a state of the art starship; with cutting edge bio-neural gel packs that replaced some of the traditional circuitry. But what happened, half way into the first season, they developed a bacterial infection, and no replacements could be replicated. If you buy a new games consul when there are only 1000 in the country, this may sound familiar.
