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Technology as a narrative element has also evolved. I distinctly remember watching X-Files in the 90s and thinking this is the first TV show where everyone is
by wrs 2y ago
Technology as a narrative element has also evolved.
I distinctly remember watching X-Files in the 90s and thinking this is the first TV show where everyone is assumed to have a cell phone. Moreover, the phone nearly always works! When one of the characters goes wandering into some dark spooky forest in British Columbia, it doesn’t mean they’re going to get their own episode or suffer a mysterious death, they just pop open their phone and call their partner. Suddenly every existing story where phone calls can only be received at fixed locations seems as old as Sherlock Holmes sending a wire by messenger. And nowadays you have to explicitly signal danger by having the character pull out their phone and see NO SIGNAL.
The second season of Severance has a scene where a character leaves his apartment to make a call at a phone booth down the street. In 1980 this would have just signaled that he wanted to make an anonymous call. In 2025 it is alarming. What is this world he’s in where there are still phone booths? Is a shot with the character framed alone, lit by the harsh light of a phone booth at night, a deliberate reference to The Matrix?
What story elements will kids today take for granted? It’s still kind of trendy in stories to show a crowd making videos of something on their phones and causing a ruckus on social media. Maybe ubiquitous video will seem to them like cell phones seemed to us.
- lnwlebjel 2y agoOne of the hilarious things about rewatching old episodes of Seinfeld is his use of a cordless phone that I swear is the size of a toaster!
- mrsilencedogood 2y agoDetective Conan, a very long-running anime, has been hilarious to watch this evolution in as well. Phones go from landlines, to cordless, to flip phones, to smartphones And at some point they get to stop re-explaining what a computer is/does every time they use one in a case.
- chrbutler 2y agoI had to explain a phone booth to my daughter recently. It was being removed from a corner spot in front of a gas station – maybe the last one in our city!
- wrs 2y agoWhat's funny to me is nearly every computer in a show made now, when everyone in the audience knows what a real computer looks like, will still have a totally fake "Hollywood UI". Mr. Robot excepted, of course.
- bitwize 2y agoThe Hollywood UIs these days seem more plausible than they used to. Someone might be manipulating files in a reasonable facsimile of Finder or Explorer, for instance.
- flyinghamster 2y agoI never really got into that, since by that time I really couldn't get into TV shows anymore - or indeed, for pretty well all of my adult life. And yet, your note reminds me that the landline phone network is pretty well dead as the dodo at this point, and the flip phones that once evoked Star Trek communicators to my generation are now, for the most part, firmly in the past. For me (over 60 now), it's quite a bit of future shock, even as I saw it happen around me. First the pay phones disappeared, then the value proposition of a landline steadily degraded until VoIP (or just porting out to a cell carrier) was a better option. It just reminds me once again that high tech has short horizons. If you found a functional example of a 1980s or 90s cell phone, there are no networks for it to use. That nifty, futuristic StarTAC is a guaranteed brick today unless it was a GSM model (and you'd better hope someone still supports 2G on its supported bands, and that you can find a battery for it).