So did you hear about that fabulous, multi-million-dollar celebrity wedding happening this weekend? What? Chelsea who? No, no, I’m talking about Lisa Simpson! One of my Facebook friends pointed out that today is the big day for Bart’s little sis:
Holy crap, does time fly. Seems like only yesterday we were living in a world without wristwatch communicators, picture phones, and humanoid robots whose heads spontaneously burst into flame and melt down like cheap candles in front of a blowtorch. Hey, wait a minute…
(Seriously, it does give me a strange feeling to think that the real-world calendar has caught up to one of The Simpsons‘ “future episodes,” which seemed so funny and so far away when they first aired. I imagine the cognitive dissonance I’ll be experiencing five years from now — 2015 was, of course, Doc and Marty’s destination at the end of Back to the Future — will probably leave me in a corner of the room, rocking back and forth and muttering to myself about parallel dimensions and curves in the spacetime continuum…)
There’s also a “picture phone” scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey. I think Skype has finally mainstreamed that medium. Thankfully, we’re still a few years away from murderous talking computers.
This is a great Simpsons episode. I love the exchange between Lisa and Marge: “Do you think I should wear a white dress?” “Honey, Milhouse doesn’t count.”
Picture phones are a pretty common trope in sci-fi movies, going all the way back to the Flash Gordon serials of the ’30s. There’s a fairly prominent use of one in Blade Runner, too; Deckard uses a payphone to try and call Rachel from the strip club. As I recall, his 20-second call (she rebuffs him and hangs up) costs $4.50 or something like that.
I haven’t used Skype myself and don’t know how prevalent it actually is — you’re the only person I know who uses it — but I understand one of the features of the new iPhone 4 is a video-phone feature. There’s a camera on the screen side of the phone, so you’re looking at the cam and the picture of the other person at the same time, thus creating a fairly natural interaction — you have eye contact. (Again, a sci-fi precedent: the old TV series Space: 1999 depicted communication devices with a similar feature, the “commlock.”)
Anyhow, I’ll give you the picture phones. Still no wrist-coms or humanoid, melting robots though.
And I agree, it is a great, great episode.
There are no wristphones because the bluetooth Borg-implant-style device is much more convenient.
Sometimes, technology outpaces even the best science fiction. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go back to reading The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy on my iPad (which, by the way, still does not have a commercially available cover that says “Don’t Panic” in large, friendly letters…)
Heh – yes, the iPad is eerily like the thing Douglas Adams was describing, isn’t it? I don’t have much use for one personally, at least not enough to justify the current price tag, but I’ve played with a friend’s, and they are a truly nifty piece of technology.
I’m willing to bet somebody on Etsy or Cafe Press has made a “Don’t Panic” cover for the thing, if you look around…