Why is it that what is acceptable is tied to the medium it’s presented or viewed in?

I read a fair amount of science fiction. In the books I read I have no problem with obviously artifical limbs with metallic skin, special jacks in your neck to make it easier to connect with computers or special hardware inserted in your spine which records all of your life experiences and allows your memories to be transfered to a new body when your current one wears out – and yet, I have trouble with these bluetooth cell phone headsets.

I’m sure you’ve seen them. They’re these little plastic devices that people have clipped to their ear so that they can talk on the phone without taking it out of their pocket. I saw someone wearing one a while back and it stuck me as a ridiculous and obscene piece of technology. I mean, why does anyone need to be that connected to their phone? And then it struck me, given my preferred reading topic as well as my career choice and one of my main interests, why is this such a big deal? It’s just applied advances in technology right? Isn’t this what I want? Wouldn’t my ideal world provide the ability to plug a computer into my skull so that I can work without needing to type or move a mouse? Without being held back by the limitations of “meatspace”? Hmm…

I’ve thought about it off and on for a few weeks and maybe I’m not as ready for these technological advances as I thought I was. Maybe it’s ok to read about them in a book – to take a brief journey into another reality – but I really don’t want to live that reality. It’s odd when you think about it. Those little phone things are hugely less invasive than many of the things that I read about, but they struck me in a much more forceful way.

I suppose that it’s just the dichotomy of reality and fiction. What’s acceptable in the medium of a story is not in the medium of real life. On the other hand, I’ve read that Science Fiction, at it’s deepest core, only takes issues that are a part of today’s world and extrapolates them out. When we read science fiction, we get a view into the world as it could (perhaps will?) be. Maybe in 10 years we’ll all have a mobile phone in our ear with an induction mike pickup in our jaw. We’ll be able to sub-vocalize our phone calls and just dial by touching a tooth (wasn’t that in Spinal Tap?).

Maybe in 20 years we won’t think anything of climbing into an antigrav vehicle controlled by a central computer which whisks us off to a job where the first thing we do is receive an injection of a special pharmaceutical cocktail designed to allow us to focus on nothing but work for a 20 hour period before going home to a pill that let’s us live enough to interact with our family before getting 2 hours of compressed sleep (they’re working on slimming it down to 1, but the test patients keep going insane after 3.7 weeks of treatment) and waking up to a specially formulated energy drink designed to provide all of the nutrients, minerals and calories our bodies need to keep going (better living through chemistry, neh?) day after day after day, always moving forward, always reaching, never stopping to think about what we’re actually reaching for or why we’re doing it.

Maybe I’m pretty happy with the way things are.