Todd Suomela's Library tagged pop-culture →  View Popular, Search in Google

The number of pop science/business/cultural studies books that have come out on the subject of the Internet in the past few years has been staggering. Off the top of my head, we’ve got Nick Carr’s The Shallows, Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody and Cognitive Surplus, Mark Bauerlein’s The Dumbest Generation, Evengy Morozov’s The Net Delusion, Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not A Gadget, Johnathan Zittrain’s The Future of the Internet; and How to Stop It, Don Tapscott’s Grown Up Digital, Kevin Kelly’s What Technology Wants, and John Palfrey & Urs Gasser’s Born Digital.

So where does this leave us? What can sociology contribute to the study of the Internet, and what can the Internet contribute to the sociological lexicon? We need new and better sociological concepts to deal with the contexts of virtuality. We need a new approach to text, one that treats it as something other than an inert data resource. We need a new approach to space and place, one that allows us to talk about these things without reference to geographic clustering. We need to rethink our privileging of face-to-face relationships in our research, and of methodologies that embed and perpetuate that privileging. But most importantly, we need to stop talking about what people do online as though it isn’t real.

Star Trek the TV show was the product of an era of confident adulthood.  If you judged us by how Hollywood portrays us now we live in a time of perpetual, sulky adolescence.  In the 60s, true love and fame (which was a matter of popular respect, not of popularity) were the rewards for grown-ups who achieved their goals.  These days true love and popularity are the goals.

Movies and TV shows often start out celebrating their main characters as outsiders and misfits, but by the end they've become the popular kids.  This is achieved either by it turning out that the misfits and outsiders have super-powers---not literally, figuratively---they are able to do something wonderful that makes them more popular than the popular kids or by a redefining of popularity.  You used to be the ideal, but now I am, so there.

What this would mean, if it's what's going on in the movie, is that Spock will turn out to be a good Starfleet officer not because he's smart, self-disciplined, logical, and open-minded, but because he's...different.

In other words, success and achievement aren't the rewards of hard-work.  They're the natural outcome of you just being you.