What Battlestar Galactica Would Have Us Believe

Warning: this article contains details about the final season and series finale of Battlestar Galactica. If you have not seen these episodes and are planning on watching, please do not read further.

Friday night, the final episode of Battlestar Galactica aired on the SciFi Channel. Providing a closing to what has been one of the most successful and complex television science fiction series must have seemed a large burden for the writers. While behind the scenes information will eventually leak about how far in advance the ending was planned, if it was part of the original plan or something that came out along the way, the final episode will leave its own statement of the theme for the entire series.

The ultimate theme of Battlestar Galactica, a science fiction series set mostly in space, is that we should all hate technology and science. From the moment the twelve colonies’ defense network was compromised, leaving all of humanity under the protection of the least advanced battleship in the fleet, to the last episode of the series, where the remaining humans (along with human-cylons) decide to send their ships packing into the sun to settle down for the agrarian life on Earth 2 (really, our Earth), the moral of the series is the end result of human technology will be self-destructive and bad for us. Our planets will be wiped out by psychotic killer robots we created, and we will be left to fend for ourselves all over again. In the last moments of the final episode, they skip ahead 150,000 years to modern Earth, and play a little video montage of robots we have today, as if warning us that we are creating cylons that will destroy us even now.

The writers and producers of Battlestar Galactica would have us believe there is no point to science, mathematics, physics, or any of the thousands of disciplines that have advanced humanity. They would have us believe that a prior society would become so frustrated, tired, and perhaps angry of such advancements, that they would unanimously decide to eschew all technological innovation and leave themselves stranded on a planet to forget all they know. They would have us believe this society would leave behind the things that any scientist, doctor, nurse, technician, artist, or practitioner of almost any trade had worked to learn and start all over again as farmers, hunters, and gatherers. They would have us believe there would be no sense of curiosity, exploration, and innovation, that they would be a people completely without hope within themselves and anything they had done in their lives.

As much as I still believe the show is one of the highest quality science fiction shows ever created, and I believe the writing has consistently been excellent, I am disappointed in the final ending to the story; that the surviving humans and cylons have turned out to be our ancestors. I think they had to take the show somewhere, and they had to leave it on a note that would give it closure, but pulling a “find Earth and they all lived happily ever after” and a “now you know the rest of the story” lacked creativity and failed to deliver upon the promise of an otherwise great show. The show needed hope for an ending, and to place that hope in modern society by making us the heirs of the cycle of violence that led to Battlestar's tragedy, and making the entire show a warning on the dangers of technology is just a bit too hokey.

Social Networks and Determining the "Next Big Thing"

A friend in marketing sent this question:

Q: I have a question for you. You seem pretty in tune with the social networking world...FB, Twitter, etc. I am looking to integrate some of these elements at work (beyond just linkedin) and also wanted to try and stay ahead of the curve. Was wondering if you had any thoughts on what the Next Big Thing might be? Are there any new mediums that you think have some real potential to be the next FB? Just curious what your thoughts are. Thanks!!

A: I don't claim any special knowledge about social networking, aside from being what I consider an 'advanced user' of technology. Oddly enough, the real experts are the kids that are using them, the generation coming up behind us, which I think is the target market you're going for, right? The key to seeing what we will be using tomorrow are the tools they are using today. Facebook and Myspace are prime examples of this, starting out with niche groups in target markets, they have both expanded beyond college students and music groups. 

Right now, though, there doesn't seem to be a 'next big thing' coming just yet, or in other words, there are several of them united around one key principle, integration. In the US (I'll get back to why this matters momentarily), Friendster and then, Myspace, had been the predominant social networks before Facebook. Facebook gained market share around college students and incoming college students, then young adults as those student graduated, and now, everyone. One of the factors that led to Facebook's domination of the medium was its ability to expand through open API's with applications that can be installed to user accounts. This has allowed integration with other services. Alongside Facebook's rise, Twitter began as a way to keep up with friends through short blurbs, and that it can be accessed using any SMS text enabled phone made it a boon to teens already using text messaging to keep up with friends. This created a synergy where SMS messages on cell networks updated through to the web with Twitter. Twitter can be integrated into Facebook through open API's, and Facebook can be integrated with numerous web services on it's own, like Youtube, Blogger, LiveJournal, etc. 
So in short, the next big thing is not any one thing, but any online services that are open, can be integrated with others, and tied into an online "net presence" for the user. Facebook does a pretty good job of this right now, but you never know, something else may come along that moves it from the dominant spot. I use Facebook because of that integration; I can send a Twitter from my phone and it shows up there, then on my blog. I can write a blog post on my laptop, and it is noted on Facebook. I can post a video with youtube on my desktop, and it's posted on Facebook. I use it because it ties my other services and devices together.
Mobile devices are and will be the single most important part of anything new. If you develop the most awesome social networking site ever known, and it can't be accessed or used on a mobile device, it's dead. Game over.
Going back to the issue of locality mentioned before, I had stated that this is true in the US. Social networks have been very regionally specific. For one reason or another, if you live in different countries, you may have more friends on certain providers. For example, in Brazil, Orkut, Google's social networking site, is very popular, yet most people in the US have never heard of it. In southeast Asia I think MSN is popular, and in other places, Yahoo has a strong following. So what we're talking about is US specific. 
As far as taking advantage of this in your field, if you were to ask me which social networking site to join, I would reply "all of them". The key is having the "net presence" I spoke of, and being able to watch the trends of what is more active, what isn't, and who is joining what. Less than half of my friends on Myspace overlap with my friends on Facebook, because they appeal to different people and different markets. I have a presence on LinkedIn, but I haven't touched it since the day my mother added me as a friend, because I now know that most things there are out of touch with where I want to be.

Let's break this down into three rules to finish up... 
1. Don't be afraid to try new things you hear about. 
2. If it's not on a mobile device, it will not succeed.
3. Different solutions will still appeal to different target demographics, but the key is drawing in as many as possible through open, cross-platform and device solutions.

This was written before Facebook's recent trip on their Terms of Use.  That situation is still developing, so it will be interesting in the next few days to see if it will have any effect at all on usage.  

Wall-E has hit Los Angeles

Wall-E Spotted in LA! from Blink on Vimeo.

Thus begins another major marketing campaign designed to fill the coffers of mass-merchandisers across the world.  Granted, Wall-E is cute, and who wouldn't want a little helper robot like that.  He might even be cute enough to overcome the American cultural resistance to robotic advancement.  

"What do you mean, 'American cultural resistance', Alex?"

I mean, look at the Japanese.  There are entire companies in Japan dedicated to advancing robotic technology to be more human in appearance, and strive for better interactive capabilities with their owners.  

The Japanese give us this:

 and 

while we Americans develop this:

 and 

So, the Japanese develop the world's first bipedal humanoid robot, just to do it, and an A.I. dog, while we make a smart vacuum cleaner and tools for war.  

The problem is, while we are tackling such great issues as people not wanting to vacuum, the Japanese are taking some of the tools they develop in robotics and using them for more noble purposes, such as this robot, designed to keep patients in nursing homes company:

and this suit, designed similarly for nursing homes, to aid nurses in moving the elderly, among other applications:

That is why I can say Americans have a cultural resistance to robotic advancements.  So, given a choice between Wall-E or Motoko Kusanagi:

I side with Japan on this one.

Should have seen this one coming...

One thing I failed to mention yesterday about Steve Jobs's presentation was the dramatic price cut on the Apple iPhone 8GB to $399, and the sell off of the 4GB model at $299. Having purchased tech products before, I can acknowledge it is easy to get the feeling that what you pay for today, you may turn around and pay less for more tomorrow.

Apple Tries To Ease iPhone Customer Anger With $100 Credit -- IPhone -- InformationWeek:

"One day after dropping the price of the iPhone by $200, Steve Jobs apologized to early adopters of Apple's smartphone, many of whom showered the chief executive with a firestorm of hate mail expressing frustration at the price cut."

Link to Steve Jobs's actual announcement.

I have received hundreds of emails from iPhone customers who are upset about Apple dropping the price of iPhone by $200 two months after it went on sale. After reading every one of these emails, I have some observations and conclusions.

Granted, any Apple customer should know you never buy any new Apple products just before a new product announcement. I think they even try to keep those quiet until a couple of weeks beforehand, just to keep sales from slowing down too much. This has probably come as quite a surprise to the early iPhone purchasers, however, many of whom waited in lines for hours to get to be among the first. $200 is a steep price to pay for that privilege, in my opinion.

To Apple's credit, however, giving a $100 credit to iPhone purchasers is going above and beyond what could be expected for any company. No one should have any reason to complain with this response, and only one day after the new prices were announced! That is incredibly fast for a large corporation. I thoroughly enjoy the Apple products I own, and with this example of customer service, you can bet I will most likely continue to use them in the future.