Hamlet Meets Star Trek

When first reading this book, I started wondering why Star Trek had to do with anything. Murray has an apparent liking to Star Trek. At the same time, however, she also quoted other books, like Brave New World, and The Garden of Forking Paths, which brought me around to be a little less skeptical about the intelligence of the writer.

A passage that brought around a moral question to me was on P. 17, when Murray writes, "Do we believe that kissing a hologram (or engaging in cybersex) is an act of infidelity to a flesh-and-blood partner? If we could someday make holographic adventures as compelling as Lucy Davenport, would the power of such a vividly realized fantasy world destroy our grip on the actual world? 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 hullucinogenic drug?"
So, is it an act of infedelity to engage in cybersex and holographic images? I think it is. The internet and these holographic images are extensions of people in real life, and it would almost be the same as actually engaging in infidelity, except for it is not happening in flesh and blood. I believe that also, our views on the world would get warped if we spent too much time in something like a holodeck. We would come to get used to the fact that, in a holodeck, you can turn it off once something starts to go wrong, and then in real life one would not know how to deal with a bad situation because you could not just tell it to turn off. Is it dangerous and debilitating? I believe it can be, but only if you let it be as dangerous. A car can be dangerous if you drive crazy. So can the alluring narratives Murray talks about.

Murray writes on page 251, " Though the technology of the Star Trek holodeck remains improbably distant and he puzzle mazes, shooting games, and tangled Web sites of the mid-1990's have only begun to tap the expressive potential of the new medium, these first experiments in digital storytelling have aroused appetites, particularly among the young, for participatory stories that offer more complete immersion, more satisfying agency, and a more sustained involvement with a kaleidoscopic world. ....It has become increasingly easy for interactors to construct their own worlds on the MUDs or to build custom game levels for open-architecture fighting games."

People have already built many worlds that they can get into on the internet, such as World of Warcraft, Diablo, and other MMORPGs, or Massively Multiplater Online Role Playing Games. The people who participate in these worlds often times lose touch with reality, and even when they are tring to converse with regular people, have a hard time doing so. I have a friend who plays these games, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to talk to him because he is so much in touch with the online world versus the world of reality.

Is all this evolution evil? I think not. Change is a good thing, but Murray warns us basically to keep in touch with the real world, while still being able to participate in the other online worlds as well.