Science Fiction as Future
Definition
Culture tells us what it is okay to like, and new culture is often shown to us through movies. We now feel it okay to use a computer interface with gesture recognition, because we’ve seen it in Minority Report. Here, Minority Report has given us the narrative that allows us to collectively imagine a future.
In the same way, Star Trek helped us to imagine the idea of the cell phone and Bluetooth wireless device. It also helped us to deal with a future of limitless horizons and exploration found on the many social sites of the Internet. Today, the interface of the laptop is the viewing screen, and the hardware is the spaceship. The browser helps us travel to different universes at nearly the speed of light, and each new website we reach becomes a new planet.
Exploring space as a pilot has already occurred. Our spaceship is the computer, the expanding boundaries of time and space that the information space of the Internet is our Universe.
Definition
Mythology is an important tool used to understand cultural values and beliefs. The mythology followed by movie-makers creates Blockbusters. All cultures have mythologies. The American Dream of progress and rags to riches is the most common one.
Science Fiction as Discourse on the Future
Especially the idea of film giving a tangible experience of the future. A beta test of how technology might work. The communicators in Star Trek, for instance, are early mobile devices that people have become very used to.
The idea of the touchscreen interface from Minority Report is now embedded in everyday consciousness because it is a shared reality. The expectation and knowledge of how a future interface might work is common to everyone who has seen the film.
In the same way, Rossom's Universal Robots and Metropolis both founded the idea of the human shaped machine, or robot, in popular culture. Future inventors, designers and writers were influenced by this collective idea and robots, once an analogy created so that man vs. machine narratives could correctly happen has become a defined subculture. Even though robots are not best created shaped like humans, they are create nonetheless. This is the effect of common mythology on culture.
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