Thursday, July 26th, 2007

Reverse anachronism

Thursday, July 26th, 2007 05:37 pm
robinturner: Raybans + Matrix coat (rayban)
We're all used to anachronism in films, from the zipper in Maid Marion's dress in old Robin Hood movies to the crossbows in Arthur, but I'm wondering if there's a word for the kind of anachronism you get when an obsolete item turns up in the future. Reality has a habit of speeding ahead of science fiction in unpredictable ways; for example, mobile phones have got so small that soon people who drop them will be crawling around on hands and knees like someone searching for a popped-out contact lens, but back in the Golden Age of SF, space settlers were still communicating via devices the size of a shoebox.

What prompted this musing was reading Neil Stephenson's Snow Crash, a piece of tongue-in-cheek cyberpunk from the '90s. Some of it is quite predictive, while other parts make you laugh, e.g. "videotape was cheap" - videotape?. OK, I still use videotape, but none of my friends do, and I imagine a time will come soon when camcorders don't actually contain any storage media at all: everything will be wirelessly beamed to some subsidiary of Google as you shoot it. (It will there be automatically edited and touched up, with a special algorithm resolving continuity errors and interesting parts being forwarded to the Department of Homepage Security.) There again, I also use a camera that has actual 36mm 35mm film in it, so I'm in danger of becoming an anachronism myself. People will look at me and say "Hang on, that guy shouldn't exist in 2007."

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Robin Turner

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