Watching the original “Star Trek” back in the day, viewers were intrigued by the hand-held ‘communicators’ Captain Kirk used to call for help when caught in a menacing situation.
For example, there was the time he was being chased by a man in a rubber monster suit around cardboard rocks on a cramped studio set representing a cramped alien planet.
Kirk and crew would say “Beam me up” into their communicators, their bodies would disintegrate into a zillion molecules and be whisked up to the Enterprise where each molecule would instantly re-assemble in perfect order.
I don’t recall there were any mishaps during this delicate process, creating a molecularly mixed-up mutant with Spock’s ears, Uhuru’s legs, Kirk’s ego and Chekov’s Russian accent . . .“Enemy wessel ahead!”
What once seemed fantastically futuristic is now the everyday.
Many of us own and can’t live without our ‘communicators’, aka smart phones.
True, they’re not capable of ‘beaming us up’ – but it’s only been around 60 years since Star Trek began, so who knows what the next 60 will bring?
Smart phones are much more than just ‘communicators’ and some recent experiences in restaurants lead me to believe 50% of smart phone users have them just to photograph their dinner.
This, to my weary bemusement, is now seen as normal behaviour that other diners are expected to tolerate.
Before the invention of the mobile phone, how would previous generations, who felt the necessity to photograph their fish’n’chips, have managed?
They’d have gone out to dinner with their Box Brownies, Nikons or Kodaks strung around their necks, like the paparazzi.
Then as each course arrived, the restaurant would have reverberated to the sound of cameras clicking and bulbs flashing every five minutes!
Today, people can instantly send photos of their meals to friends (why?), but, pre-mobile phones, once the roll of film had been used-up, it would have had to be sent off to TruPrint or Boots to be developed.
So they’d need to wait patiently until they could show their mates an 8 x 10 of what they’d had for dinner two weeks before!
It would have been as pointless then as it is now!