Science fiction attempts to predict the future, yet always does a better job of describing the present. It reveals the limits of human creativity in all the most exciting and laughable ways. If we can look back, and recognize the resilience of humankind, we can have some consideration of how we got here in a way that helps ground us in the conditions of our present. The continuation of this essay traces the trajectory of videotelephony in cinema and asserts a few nuances these films reveal about the technology and its authorship today. 

These examples parallel potential uses of technology, methods for making remote communication more tactile, and warning signs of potential misuse.

Picturephones of Space Station V are architecturally like a pay phone except there exists a chair and the dialing interface is much like a desk. While I see the window and glass door as unimaginative artifacts of the payphone, it is amusing to see the comparison of this to our home-offices. The picturephone is a room with a single program, but the design of the door as sliding, floor-to-ceiling glass, which Floyd never touches, makes it almost immaterial.This softens the boundary between the public gathering room and the personal communication room. Like the rarely blank zoom room, the window is a reminder of context and distraction. Floyd starts the call by inserting a card (likely a pay phone credit card), and punches in a few digits  likely to be a phone number. I like to think of the number pad as being a passcode to prevent zoom bombing. The ensuing conversation with his daughter is especially boring.

Video Telephony and Control

Fritz Lang’s  Metropolis,1927, gave the world the first example (I have found) of videotelephony in cinema. The scene is set in the home of Joh Fredersen, the stern master of the vast, futuristic, titular industrial city of 2026. In order to best rule all he surveys — and to complete the image of a 20th-century dystopia — he lives high above the infernal roil of Metropolis, safely ensconced in one of its vertiginous towers and equipped with the latest hulking, wall-mounted, inexplicably paper-spouting video phone technology.

Fredersen, writes Joe Malia in his notes on video phones in film, “appears to use four separate dials to arrive at the correct frequency for the call. Two assign the correct call location and two smaller ones provide fine video tuning. He then picks up a phone receiver with one hand and uses the other to tap a rhythm on a panel that is relayed to the other phone and displayed as flashes of light to attract attention.”(3) I see the paper trail as today's email chain artifacts of zoom and the tuning of a machine to the on screen windows to check internet connection, audio input source, etc.

This system allows the Master of Metropolis to oversee production and send orders from his cultured utopia down to the bleak underworld populated by, in large, mistreated workers. 

Similarly, George Jetson’s boss, Cosmo Spacely, uses his technology to oversee employee productivity without leaving his desk. In this scene Spacely checks in on the office watercooler to find Jetson goofing off with coworkers. He reprimands him through the device, and demands he come to his office (by pneumatic tube) to scold him in-person immediately. Clearly, this video screen was not a tool for Spacely to communicate across a complex environment, but exists to maintain his capitalist position of control and production.

This last example, from Back to the Future, I include not for redundancy, but to emphasize how the film uses the technology a bit differently. The size of the videoscreen in the Jetsons was relatively small because that was the average size of TV’s then. In 1989, the bigger the TV, the closer you were to achieving the American Dream. Marty McFly’s boss takes up nearly a whole wall! It sits mounted above the fireplace, an element previously foundational to the American home as a place for cooking, warmth, and congregation. Furnaces, ovens, and microwaves confused American homes with no recommendation for how to repurpose this nostalgic gathering place. Here, it is the backdrop to McFly’s professional existence.

Maybe more interesting is this example is the text in the scene, giving it the rhetorical strength of a meme. Text, an abstraction of human communication, paired with syntax of video compound to drive the point home; YOU’RE FIRED. If that wasn’t enough, the fax made the message physical. He made the message into matter. Now, McFly knows he has lost the gig through sight, sound, and touch. 

When the stay at home orders first began, Trekkies sprung at the opportunity to download Zoom backgrounds of the bridge of the USS Enterprise so they could sit as Captain Kirk or Piccard, looking at their lame computer as if it were the main viewscreen of the ship. 2021’s monitors are not lame by any means, but they pale in comparison to the capacity of the Star Trek Universe’s viewscreens. While a monitor displays a two dimensional raster image, the viewscreens can look in any direction around the ship, zoom in, and show any and all sensor data and communications signals. To be explicit, the viewscreen (especially those with the blue frame in The Original Series) are not two dimensional screens, but provide a three dimensional, mostly immersive space. Considering posture and gaze, through contemporary media, others see us through channels outside our optical control. That means that for the contemporary subject the gaze of the other remains unidentifiable; it is constituted only through an assumption, through a suspicion. Imagine the connectivity we could have if we knew our blood cameras(pipilotti rist) were looking at each other or at the same coordinate?

Beyond our sedentary existence on zoom, when characters meet through main viewer, it happens in times of great conflict. The distant person(s) appear often with their full bodies on screen.  While sometimes move their hands, I see this framing as more of a framing of honesty. By capturing almost the entire body there is little to hide. To be extreme, this contrasts the zoom faceplan which is almost like a western movie’s poker player; concealed fisticuffs under the table, ready to strike. The ability to communicate in a crisis with the nuance of expression and full body vulnerability is one of exposure, diplomacy, and assertiveness. Of course, to be kind, the more one crops out of their zoom frame, the less there is to have to control and curate.

Regarding the view out of the ship, the viewscreen grants a nearly stereo view without the lens distortion of panoramic photography as we know it today. From the interior, the mainviewer is at the technological disposal of the officers of the bridge as an extreme stereo sensory extension of the body. 

One of my favorite scenes in The Next Generation is from S1E18, Heart of Glory, 1988, when 

the bridge and viewers at home finally get a glimpse of what Geordi La Forge sees through his visor. For background, we learned earlier in the season that La Forge’s visor is actually a VISOR (an acronym for Visual Instrument and Sensory Organ Replacement), a medical device used in the Federation to aid patients who suffered loss of eyesight or who were born blind. Instead of giving standard vision of the visible light spectrum, Le Forge can, "see much of the electro magnetic spectrum, ranging from simple heat and infrared through radio waves, etcetera, etcetera…” – Beverly Crusher and Geordi La Forge

Using the visual acuity transmitter, the Enterprise’s bridge sees the first-person VISOR view on the main viewer.  Data explains, “the information from Geordi’s VISOR is so complex it is difficult to encode. Therefore, the signal breaks down easily.” The following scene show’s a derivative of La Forge’s technicolor world with frequent clarifying questions from Piccard on the bridge: 

Picard: can you filter out the extraneous information?

La Forge: No. I get it all simultaneously

Picard: But it’s just a jumble. . . How do you make head or tail of that?

La Forge: I select what I want and then disregard the rest.

Picard: But how is that possible?

La Forge: Well, how in a noisy room can you select one specific voice or sound?

Picard:  Of course, something you learn . . . 

This brief glimpse through his VISOR gives us immediate access to his egocentric view, and also warrants respect for the attention and filtering he is capable of. Considering the unique qualities each crew member possesses, this makes us realize the perceptual differences this crew may hold. Just being different is not exactly important here, but thinking about the collective benefit the crew gains by seeing and understanding the perceptual capacity of La Forge’s world. By seeing the material stress in the damaged hull, La Forge saves the five lives on the ship. As a recurring theme, by employing different characters’ perceptual and cognitive abilities aboard the ship, they are unbelievably strong problem solvers who experience vastly complex emotional situations. 

For a painfully boring comparison, this scene reminds me of zoom screen sharing and the request remote control feature. Almost always, someone needs clarification as we step into someone else’s frame that they’ve already been watching and are accustomed to. These moments are also brief glimpses into the attention capabilities of others. How can you keep track of so many tabs? Let’s stop this comparison here before I ruin a good piece of cinema any further.



Regarding the main viewscreen throughout all of Star Trek, I do not believe that the audience is ever told what the material of the viewscreen is. A scene from First Contact prompts this question. The bridge’s crew is staring at a wall which flashes into a holographic projection when Piccard says, “on-screen.” Any other time in the saga, hero ships’ main veiwscreen shows a generic starfield. This is all conjecture here, but this gives a default view of looking forwards, with the command "on-screen" otherwise suggesting a re-focusing, or re-orienting, towards a specific goal. This may involve panning or zooming.

It makes sense that the bridge should exist in the middle of the ship for safety purposes, but what an abysmal existence-- sitting in a permanently stressed room with no windows in the middle of space. Based on the clip, I can just assume the bridge crew never lets their eyes leave that blank wall. Since they never showed this style of main viewer again, we can assume the writers also realized how weird this was. While possibly an error, it is valuable to this discussion. 

Monitors and screens have a wasteful existence in our lives while they are dormant, not flashing information. We wish they would disappear from view like all the best houses on shows like MTV Cribs. Remember when celebrities pressed some button and a plasma screen rose sexually from the fish tank, fireplace, jacuzzi, dresser, concrete, or whatever else that was clearly not previously a TV. 

For the majority of ships in Star Trek, the default view is a star field, and the screen is always on. It’s supposed to function as a window would until activated. It may even be a window. We know for sure that the Enterprise of JJ Abrams’s universe actually is just a window; it's very thick glass, and from the bridge, we can actually see the saucer hull (which is different from all of the previous portrayals of the main viewer). Images are superimposed onto the glass. Across this massively wide main viewscreen, images appear poorly cropped in front of a starfield. Each time characters pop onto the screen, the cropping of their picture mimics the overcropped frames of people today on webcams. Whereas characters before stood in the open for their call to the Enterprise, Abrams’s characters are most likely sitting in front of a computer. This doesn’t say much other than society’s physical posturing with technology and our subsequent dialogic posturing across technology. 

In contrast, characters calling between Earth and the Space Station in the Disney Channel Original Movie, Zenon: Girl of the 21st Century, show a more cinematographically speculative posture with video-telephones. The iPad-like Zap Pad is a personal tablet characters use when their email and phone calls are not communicative enough for the urgent emotional, or rhetorical demand of a message. Director Kenneth Johnson intentionally framed all Zap Pad scenes over the shoulder of the character. The audience is able to join in the directional gaze of the character. Watching with is a novel comparison to watching at (see faceplan in glossary). This dialogic framing keeps the viewer in a situation where we can join in the situation alongside them. Johnson reinforces this framing by having the characters use the Zap Pad with each other the same way. As half of Zap calls involve multiple people, Johnson’s use of this tool almost makes the audience another character, temporarily existing in the scene. Cinematographically, this also means that the audience gets a completed front and rear facing view of the scene. 

PADD

(see viewscreen; page 38)

Not too distant from Zap Pads are Star Trek’s Person Access Display Devices (PADD).

These devices are hand held communication and data devices, powered by sarium krellide power cells (this probably makes as much sense to some as the term lithium-ion battery). PADDs often display schematics, or subspace transmissions, and are capable of wireless computer networking as well as playing movies, recording logs, and audio playback. Crewmembers are seen a few times “reading” from them in their downtime in the mess hall. I don’t mean to linger on this as it’s similarities to phone and tablet computers is blinding. What does need mention is that there is not a universal PADD design. In fact, PADDs vary based upon the species of their manufacturer or user which means that not only do they look different, but they all function a bit differently. The authorship and intended usership affect its functionality which affects the content and perceptual quality of its functioning. One cannot blindly accept an interface's output considering how much the medium is the message when it comes to technology.

The red alert is somewhat like the emergency text messages the U.S. government currently uses. It’s possible these PADDs are maybe just devices distributed for government to civilian emergency communication, but I would like to think these are simply civilian PADDs which the government can access.

This PADD as an object still had some physicality to it (I wish it didn’t), but that physicality is simply that of a computer and projector. The interface (the part we care about) is an immaterial, holographic screen. Once again, it’s content but not matter (let’s not talk about photons).

Tricorder 

I see Star Trek’s Tricorder as the mascot of this whole study.  

This spall device senses, analyzes, and records. It is used as an environmental scanner, and a medical scanner when an attachment is added. Characters frequently call it a scanner which is really cutting it short. As it draws data, it analyzes it based upon how it was programmed, and rapidly publishes its findings e.g. there’s life - there’s no life. For the away teams (groups who leave the ship to go explore often dangerous environments), the tricorder is a must-have as it quickly informs them if lifeforms exist nearby. It’s dead wrong far too often though. Why? It was designed by a lifeform who does not know what ALL signs of life are! This is as of yet the most obvious example of witness bias and authorship error in trusted technology. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that Starfleet should let the Tricorder remain as a medical device for humanoids, but find something new for the away team right away.  

What separates the Tricorder from the smartphone of today is its interface. One can see all of the buttons of the Tricorder. It makes obvious all of its functions and reveals its innards. Sure, its sinews and algorithms for processing are packaged in its case, but it's functionally is discernible, material, and tactile, unlike the magical capabilities and processes our devices are doing presently. Clarity in this way brings with it some honesty and trustworthiness which may be the reason Starfleet continues using it. Theoretically that would make sense. In recognizing that Star Trek is just a show, the Tricorder’s errors just make for a great plot device.

Transporter room or holodeck

As our future bends toward the greater capabilities and implementation of virtual reality and augmented reality, this review concludes at Star Trek’s transporter room and holodeck.

The transporter room moves lifeforms and objects to and from the ship to anywhere else in near proximity. This speeds up the plot, but is a tool to get crew members in and out of danger in an instant (should the operator be able to lock onto them). Immediate action takes place as the transporter beams crew members down, and it often removes them from the physical consequences of a situation with the blink of an eye. As this thesis seeks to understand the implications of remote connectedness, I find the transporter room fascinating as placing crew into an alien environment and reporting to the bridge is often the most accurate and telling information the bridge may obtain. Digital communication and main viewscreen calls rarely handle diplomatic situations as effectively as the meatspace conversations only achievable with the transporter room. Spatially, the transportation requires the room. I do not believe one may beam from one location to another without returning to the transporter room first. One space anchors (rather frangibly) this teleportation.

Inversely, the holodeck creates a virtual environment for crew members to visit. Starfleet installs holodecks aboard starships, space stations, and at Starfleet institutions for use in entertainment, training, and investigative purposes. Holo- from the greek holos, means “whole” or “entire’ which is an accurate naming of the completely immersive environments it creates. Aside from touching a keypad, people have no contact with the sliding doors as they walk right into an entirely alien world and time.

When Lieutenant Tasha Yar dies on an away trip, a scene at the end of the episode       shows the crew holding a funeral for her on the holodeck. It gets weirder. Lieutenant Yar is speaking at her own funeral on the holodeck. The space projects a pastoral scene (looking like Bliss, 1996), and a prerecorded postmortem address by Yar apperates. This moment brings the entire crew, including Lieutenant Commander Data to an emotional goodbye. Is it pre-recorded though? It would make more sense that this is some sad and early forecast of deepfake technology. Maybe it is only me; I don’t think I want a deep fake of my friend to eulogize herself at her funeral. This disassociation would only mean that the digital soul may exist independent from one’s physical existence, and emotions are quantifiable. 

While there exist numerous themes from these examples of science fiction, they press the importance of maintaining some facture of real space and real sensations as we continually evolve as a society in our dual, digital existence. 

My favorite PADD is from the recent Star Trek: Short Treks series. We see a holographic display on pocket-sized PADDs in 2385. By 2385, a pocket sized version was available to civilians on Earth. It has a pop-up, holographic display and a lip-stick sized physical interface. In this episode, a group of rogue synth attack Mars. The Federation News Network's red alert caused the device's display to automatically activate, flashing red.