Kindles, iPods, and PADDs

Posted on May 6, 2009 in Design, Films/Theatre, IT | 5 comments

With the release of the new Star Trek movie this Friday, and the announcement of the Kindle DX, it seemed appropriate to share an observation I’ve had for a couple of years now. Our level of technology in 2009 is approaching what Gene Roddenberry envisioned for the Star Trek universe of the 24th century. Maybe not in transporter technology (though Tenacious D has already asked that the scientists get working on the tube technology) or holographic doctors, but certainly in information display devices. To wit:

At left are “PADDs,” or Personal Access Display Devices, were used in the Star Trek shows to share information. In many scenes, an officer would hand someone a PADD and say something like “here are the duty rosters you wanted,” or there would be a half dozen of them scattered over a desk.

At right is Amazon’s upcoming ebook reader, er… “wireless reading device,” the Kindle. It can download books, magazines, and purportedly textbooks. Not shown here are the iPhone and iPod Touch, which serve quite well as ebook readers in their own right thanks to the dozens of ebook and other “media-consumption” applications, for lack of a better term (I’m thinking here of the WSJ news reader, Penguin Classics, and many others).

So, are we there? Do we have 24th century technology? Hard to say for sure, since it’s only the 21st century and I’m comparing a prop from TV shows over a decade old to a future a couple centuries hence. But I can draw some conclusions, mainly about how the producers of Star Trek (indeed, most everyone at that time) misjudged how information would be shared in the future.

That concept is the network. The “cloud.” The interwebs. In the mid 90s, the then-nascent World Wide Web wasn’t mature enough to spark the imaginations of producers. They were still locked into the paradigm of a “device that contains information,” rather than a “device that consumes information.” Sure, the egalitarian worldview espoused by Star Trek came though in the ease with which these PADDs—presumably very valuable, high-tech devices—are passed around without worry to cost or ownership. But just a decade or so on, the reality of information exchange facilitated by the Internet has antiquated the show’s vision of the distant future’s information medium. Content now comes to your device and is shared out from your device to others. You don’t pass your iPod or Kindle to someone to give them your duty roster or whatnot; you simply e-mail, blog, upload, or tweet your content to the network for their retrieval.

I may be reading too much into this. Okay, I most certainly am. But I do feel it’s worth noting that devices like the Kindle, iPod, and lesser-known devices like Sony’s ebook reader present an interesting advancement in information consumption. Newspapers—at least, those printed on dead trees—are a dying breed. Journalism isn’t dead, but that medium is dying out. These devices and their ilk are replacing paper for a growing segment of the marketplace and for an expanding demographic. It’s an exciting time to be a consumer, producer, and observer of information.

One thing I know for sure: any sci-fi show will be dated to the era in which its produced. In another couple decades technology will make today’s cutting-edge communication methods look like Dr. Who stepping into a phone booth. (Wait, what’s a phone booth again?)

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