On 09/11/2014 10:57 PM, SS wrote:
On Wed, 2014-09-10 at 22:07 -0400, Bruce A. Metcalf wrote:
This is obvious, yet many will continue to insist that history can
offer relevant answers. I do not believe that it can.
... I am looking for ostensibly "neutral" and "academic and
broad-based" studies.
But they aren't available because we don't have any other example of
a culture enduring such a high rate of technological change for such an
extended period. Academia, by its nature, cannot address novel
phenomenon.
OK let me re-post something that I posted a few days ago in response to
Chew Lin Kay's thread about whether SciFi can change the world
At the bottom are links to two videos - one from the 1920s and the other
from the 1960s predicting the future. Please watch them and judge for
yourself, but I will post my own reactions first.
The first thing that strikes me about the two videos is not what they
got wrong, but how much they got right. To me the question is" Were
these simply accurate predictions" or road maps that inspired people of
that age to make those predictions come true. Someone did say in this
discussion that SciFi would serve as a beacon to inspire - so were these
predictions simply "made to come true"? That would be SciFi guiding and
moulding society, not necessarily (but possibly) in the right way.
I think someone said that SciFi *could* serve as a beacon to inspire.
It's pretty clear that Sir Arthur Clarke's fiction about geosynchronous
satellites inspired the present constellation of them. "Analog" magazine
famously published an article about the atomic bomb before the Manhattan
Project got their first boom; based as it was on publicly available
knowledge, it was only wartime urgency that prevented that from being
prophetic.
Other examples may be found. So too contrary examples where SciFi was
way off base, but that's the deal with predictions, you guess wrong a
lot. Doesn't mean it's not worth considering while you're waiting for
your flying car to show up.
The second thing that strikes me is the fact that both these videos had
the stereotype "heterosexual core family" - faithful husband, earning
and paying the bills, expressing anxiety about wife's bills; devoted
wife and mother, playing the female role, cooking, looking after the
house; an adolescent girl child whose dress and behaviour appears
totally out of place today....
So... you think they could have distributed a film in the 1920s or 1960s
that showed single-parent families, gay couples, communes, or other
behavior then broadly thought to be "deviant"? Television in particular
(and theatrical shorts before it) was an exceedingly conservative
medium, at least until cable and the Internet lowered the entry
barriers. Let's try to separate our criticism of the ideas in those
films from criticism of the cultural milieu in which they were obliged
to operate.
So what did the videos get right and what did they get wrong?
The videos got much of the technological aspects right. The videos got
the social and psychological aspects wrong. So how good would Sci Fi be
in guiding future societies?
Exactly! Both films addressed technological advances, not social or
psychological ones. A bit harsh to criticize them because they didn't do
something they hadn't tried to do.
A sample size of two is not enough to suggest that SciFi cannot address
social issues. See Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange Land" for one
example that presaged social changes, if only by a little. Phillip K.
Dick has said some interesting things about society, as well. There are
others.
As a general rule, anyone who points a finger at something and says,
"Science Fiction doesn't address *that*," has probably just not read
enough science fiction.
Fortunately, that's curable. <g>
Regards,
Bruce
