social media

TRX
February 10, 2012
242:
> Therefore it's quite logical that the
> characters don't do anything
> frivolous as they're all perfect
> examples of New Soviet Starfleet Man

If you think that's bad... there are persistent rumors of a new show based on E.E. Smith's Lensman stories, to be produced by Michael Straczynski.

I was probably 12 years old when I first read the Lensman books, and I had problems with them even then. The Lensmen were some sort of super- Schutzstaffel; not just judge, jury, and executioner, but performing covert mind control, usurping the power of (their own) planetary governments, etc. But though the bad guys were doing the same thing, it was okay for the Lensmen to do it since they were the good guys. Even then, it was pretty hard to tell the difference.

The Lensman universe was an extension of the 1930s Gernsback world of the future, and would be easy to translate to TV. And since everything the Lensmen did was good, and everything the Boskonians did was evil, the stories would be easy to follow.

Not something I'd be likely to make time to watch, though...

TRX
February 10, 2012
243:
> Star Trek in any of it's iterations
> is not Science Fiction, it does not
> try to predict the future and how we
> deal with it

All I ask is a bit of entertainment without having to strain willing suspension of disbelief too hard.

According to his book "The Making of Star Trek" (which addresses most of the "why didn't they..." comments earlier in the thread), the show was supposed to be a sort of space western. "Science fiction" in 1966 meant little pulp magazines with silly pictures on the covers, "Captain Video" or the latter seasons of "Lost In Space"; the very idea of something as serious as a "space western" was hard to get the network to accept. Westerns were serious business in the early/mid '60s; SF was for children and strange people.

TRX
February 10, 2012
246:
> Apparently the most recent movie "The
> Muppets" is communist propaganda as
> well.

Given that about half of the CPUSA were active FBI agents or paid FBI informers by the mid-1960s, it's hard to decide whether I would be more alarmed by the possibility it might Communist propaganda or that it might be FBI propaganda...

TRX
February 10, 2012
256:
> Props for using a known bit to Trek
> timeline to explain the aversion to
> social media

Another possibility: orders from StarFleet banning "social media" on ground of... let's see, operational security, deleterious effect on military conduct, wasting time on duty, because some old fogey with admiral's stripes doesn't like it...

TRX
February 14, 2012
281:
In an oddly appropriate piece of synchronicity, I'm about a quarter of the way through John Barnes' "Directive 51."

In Barnes novel, a worldwide terrorist attack is launched by... nobody in particular, just a loose association of people feeding each others' anger and resentment. Enough of them manage to cooperate enough to do something.

I'm not far enough along to see how Barnes will handle this, but it's interesting how nicely it dovetails with things like Charlie's Spy Game in "Halting State", or 4Chan, or even the otherwise-normal people who assure me something is true because they read about it on the internet.

Throw in something about rumor outstripping fact, the spread of memes, or dealing with other cultures that don't make a clean distinction between fiction and fact, and I could definitely see one reason for a lack of social media in the Federation. When you're sitting on a multicultural powder keg, it's not a good idea to start handing out boxes of matches for every wannabee prophet, mullah, or fuhrer to play with.

Going back to meetings and paper might be a small price to pay to avoid that kind of trouble.

In real life, I view the claims of "social media" to be vastly overrated and mostly irrelevant, but it wouldn't be good to forget that while people could read and write before Gutenberg developed the printing press, the cheaply- printed handbills those presses cranked out destabilized all of Europe and set off a chain of wars, and centuries later cheap printing made the "newspaper" a force to be reckoned with - both Mussolini and Hitler owned newspapers outright, and Lenin, Stalin, and Churchill were all reporters at one time or another. "It must be true, I read it in the newspaper/heard it on the radio/saw it on TV/read it on a web site..." Somehow, I imagine there'll still be people like that in the 25th century.