There is a huge interest in a particular kind of future. The kind of future we saw portrayed and predicted on our TV and silver screens in the Sixties and Seventies. A future full of gleaming towers. moon bases, jet cars and space travel for all. Its often called a retro-future.
I suppose it was almost inevitable that this gleaming future seemed to the right, well, future. The West was still suffering the effects of World War II well into the late Fifties. Out of the rubble sprang a bright rocket of youthful vitality and tomorrow was in the hands of a new young generation, a generation that put Thunderbirds on our screens every week and landed men on the Moon for the first time.
As kids we lapped it up, every rocket, every space walk, every jet car. We were the audience and we loved it all. There was no question what the future would be like. It would definitely be a tomorrow from TV21 or Space Odyssey or UFO. We had the space toys and believed it all.
So what happened? Is that future still on its way? Is it already here in some kind of stealth mode? Are the tablets and ipads and smartphones and the net heralds of that tomorrow or are they actually it in a sort of diet form, a retro future-lite, forever diluted and never reaching full strength?
Is that gleaming future on its way readers or were we simply duped?
Lately I've been reading a lot about smart watches that will not only tell time and forward your calls and messages but also track your exercise and heart rate and pulse and blood pressure and blood glucose and sleep patterns. The rhetoric about technology and ingenuity improving our lives and bringing us a better future is 100 percent the same kind of talk we heard in the Sixties about the Space Race and computers. These things go in cycles, and right now we're in a phase of utopian optimistic predictions. It may not seem that way because the sentiments are expressed differently, but there's a definite shift going on.
ReplyDeleteThe Age of Aquarius and its bright shiny, easygoing, nuclear powered future will never arrive. There may be brief manifestations of parts of it, rhe helpful robots and electric cars, but the future will be vurtual, a 'concensual hallucination' as William Gibson puts it, as more and more time is spent online. I think we'll end up more like the atrophied, obese humans in WALL-e. Nobody looks up from their smartphone anymore, all human life is here...
ReplyDeleteThats 'virtual' - another consequence of the smartphone revolution, text typos!
ReplyDeletePredictions about the future are always a reflection of and based on the state of the art at the time they're made. So they shoot off on different tangents, esp when compared from today's perspective, both in what they represent and how they look.
ReplyDeletePrediction-wise, we now indeed have all-in-one communication devices à la Star Trek, and it looks like we'll soon have driverless cars etc (don't think I'll like those). Heck, there's even a jetpack, sort of. But I agree with Bill that a lot of it will be virtual, and Big Brother-like depending on your degree of paranoia. So far the virtual is an advantage (we would otherwise never have met) but as with all things in life there's drawbacks too (the daily argument when the boys need to get off the computer f ex). And there's nothing to stop me from appreciating obsolete technology!
Best -- Paul
Remember your Star Wars-Despite all the boffo technology beyond ours,everything had an organic,dusty lived- in look.When I was in elementary school(mid 70's) Our Weekly Reader predicted you would be able to see the person you're calling in the future.Sure enough,I got my first E-camera call in 2001.My grand daughter does Face-Time calls to her friends every evening with her I Pad.It's all pretty low key,no chrome tubing or Tesla lightning or zapping noises...a shame.
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