According to wikipedia, it is “a simulated reality facility located on starships and starbases in the fictional Star Trek universe.”

Janet Murray makes numerous references at the beginning of her book, to the holodeck used in the Star Trek television show.

But, what do we care about this odd invention that exists only in the futuristic imaginations of authors and directors?

The forward acceleration of technology, and the ever present need for humans to fully emerce themselves in alternate realities, is making the holodeck a very real presence in current society. A holodeck is what we today would consider a controllable alternate reality. In Murray’s Hamlet on the Holodeck, she poses some crucial questions pertaining to this concept: “Will the increasingly alluring narratives spun out for us by the new digital technologies be as benign and responsible as a nineteenth-century novel or as dangerous and debilitating as a hallucinogenic drug?” (17). Society is already experiencing the symptoms of virtual obsession  with the current foray of online multi-role playing video games, sites such as MySpace and Facebook, ect. This virtual obsession and the concept of holodecks brings to mind the 3D rides that are so popular in theme parks and mall arcades, where and individual is able to experience a virtual situation that closely possess as “real life.”

Murray continues on to indicate the attractiveness a holodeck is to society. Virtual reality provides various potential relationships and outlooks. Sites such as Eharmony.com, allows insecure individuals to reach out to others without the need to physically meet another person. This enables people to connect with people not only within their neighborhood but all over the globe.

Conversations and situations can stimulate emotional and physical responces very similar to how the illusions a holodeck illicit responces from humans. This is reminicient of the literature created by the Victorians (sensory literature) that feasted on the emotional and physical responces of the reader. This intense illusion is what audiences/readers have been enjoying for centuries. Instead, technology is morphing our controllable illusions (a novel that can be closed and put away for further reading) or uncontrollable illusions (virtual reality, and the people who interact with us through that reality).

Through out many literary and televised mediums, “virtual reality technologies are explicitly equated with lethal drugs as the source of addiction, destitution, bad trips, overdose deaths, and gangster violence” (Murray 23). However, virtual reality is also a medium that allows us to face inner feelings that we would other wise supress. The holodeck, “like any literary experience, is potentially valuable in exactly this way. It provides a safe space in which to confront disturbing feelings we would otherwise supress; it allows us to recognize our most threatening fantasies without becoming paralized by them” (Murray 25).

And, in order to prevent technologies such as the holodeck from being a harmful influence on humankind, we must be stronger than the technology’s influence. If it becomes something that consumes our personalities and identitities, it is because WE make it that way. Humans are responcible to not allow the holodeck to consume them. In Murray’s text (being a feminist) she shows examples of this through Captain Janeway’s control over her own Holodeck, where she can pause, start, and terminate any illusion she creates or faces.

=============================

Text Cited:

Murray, Janet H. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace

Advertisement