I am vey much a sci-fi and tech geek.  I am a gadget guy and many of the TV shows that I follow are found on the SyFy channel.  I love to have the new toys (though I usually wait for the second generation of new devices) and I do try to find a use for them in my life.

Recently I dug up an old Sci-Fi show that competed with the likes of StarTrek:TNG for three-and-a-half seasons.  It was a show that many criticized, though I watched it religiously when it originally aired.  What show you ask.  SeaQuest DSV.  Set in the “near future” which happens to be only a few years from now.  I thought that it had more potential originally, and I think that the concept could still be viable today, but there is probably a reason that I don’t make such decisions.

What I did notice while re-watching the show is how they predicted technology.  It has been a recurring theme recently that many tech blogs have talked about, how sci-fi shows may actually drive the R&D on some of the pieces of technology that we use today.  Looking at SeaQuest, one of the things that stood out was from an episode where they visited one of the main communications network hub.  They talked about the great potential that fiber-optic networking had.  Fast forward to today and we now have companies that are bringing fiber right into our homes.  We are now piping huge amounts of data including HDTV, high speed internet, and voice communications into homes over tiny pieces of fiber optic cable and we are far from the bandwidth limits.

Watching SeaQuest today, though I don’t know much about submarines, much of the technology is believable.  All over the ship you see large, wide-screen displays which, at the time were probably created using a rear-projection technique.  Yet today it is commonplace to see large flat panel video displays.  Much of what they use on the show doesn’t seem like it is far out of reach from where we are today.

Then look at the birth of the tactile tablet computer like Apple’s iPad.  I know that I have seen this mentioned on some tech blogs, but it is basically a working version of the PADDs (Personal Access Display Device) used on StarTrek:TNG.  All thing considered, iOS might almost be a little more sophisticated than anything we actually saw LCARS (Library Computer Access/Retrieval System) do aside from fly starships (though I am sure there is an app for that!).  The groundwork is being laid though and we may meet or surpass some of the technology like that imagined for shows like StarTrek:TNG and SeaQuest DSV.

The here and now is certainly an interesting time to be living in given the current rate that technology is progressing.  While we may not quite be at a place where we can just slide data from device to device like in Minority Report or Avatar, but we are getting there.  With apps like “Bump” you can literally bump two iPhones together to send information between them.  It isn’t quite perfect, but it works.  Do we need the level of connectivity we are headed towards? Who knows, but the ride is pretty cool.

In general, many of us live pretty public lives nowadays.  Even if you don’t do Twitter or don’t have a blog you probably have a Facebook or a MySpace page or belong to some other online community.  The strange thing is that even if you don’t really do anything online there is still a bunch of information about you out there in cyberspace.  We leave cyber trails without even knowing it.  It can be a little overwhelming to try and manage it all and I would assume that most people my age don’t really think twice about their cyber presence.

What got me thinking about it was the fact that a couple days ago I got an email from Facebook that someone had commented on my status.  Turns out that it was my grandfather who had made the comment using my grandmother’s Facebook account on a status update that I didn’t realize had been posted about my latest blog entry. (how was that for a convoluted sentence?)  Needless to say, I didn’t even know that my grandparents really knew what Facebook was, let alone had an account.

I got on Facebook when it was fairly new, in fact I believe that I had to wait until they had added my school as one that was eligible to sign up from.  I probably used it a lot more at that point in my life compared to know.  While it is not as convoluted as MySpace, Facebook has so much going on now with all the apps and ads and pages and fans and whatnot.  Even if I were to clear out all of the notifications currently sitting in my inbox there, I would probably have hundreds more within a week.  I even block lots of Facebook apps, but every day there are new ones and new invitations.  Most of the time they are from “friends” who I really have had nothing to do with since high school.  Sometimes I wonder what the point really is.

Getting that email and comment, while it did get me to call my grandmother to say hi, was one of the last things that I ever expected to see in my inbox.  They are not totally technologically illiterate, but they are not computer wizzes.  The whole situation was an interesting reminder of how quickly information is disseminated and how far it can get.

I actually find the timing of this rather interesting as Sci-Fi (Sy-Fy now I suppose) just aired the pilot episode of Caprica. For those non-sci-fi people out there, the premise of Caprica, which is a prequel to Battlestar Galactica, where a preeminent scientist looses his daughter in a terrorist bombing.  Zoe, the daughter had been working on a digital version of herself based on collecting the information from her digital trail through life.  The concept being that what we are today is a sum of the events that led to today and much of that is traceable given how much of our lives are contained in the digital world.

I hear people say all the time that you have to be careful with what you post online.  While it is true that employers may look at the Facebook and MySpace pages of potential and current employees, how much of your life can you really keep private these days?  How much information do you keep private?  Is it actually possible to live a truly private life? Is there anyone whose name you can type into Google and just not turn up anything?

Over the last day I have been discussing the effect of social networking on summer camps with the parent of a camper (@warrenss see his blog post on the topic). The camps that I work for have just started using Twitter, and so far I am doing the bulk of the tweeting. On top of my other responsibilities at camp, this is a fun one, but it is complicated and time consuming.

One might ask: “how hard can it be to post some 140 character messages throughout the day?” But it is really far more complicated than that. First and foremost, we have to make sure that we protect the privacy of our campers while still tweeting about what is going on at camp. Second, there is only one of me, and I can’t be everywhere at once. If you know camp, there is always something going on everywhere at the same time.

Then there is the issue of followers and following people. So far, we have been trying to limit our followers to parents, campers, staff, and alumni. We are not currently following anyone. It raises interesting questions because services like Twitter are designed to facilitate two way communication. I am not an administrator of the camp, so how would I deal with parents who start replying and/or posting questions. Most of the administration is busy all summer making sure that camp runs smoothly for 8 weeks, the last thing they want to have to do is moderate our Twitter accounts. We also can’t tweet what every camper in camp is doing every moment of the day, so how do you deal with the parents who feel like their kid doesn’t get enough “tweet” time?

The whole media/social media at camp is an interesting conundrum. Camp is supposed to be a vacation, a get-away from the normal. We collect all the kids cell phones, campers don’t have internet access, and they only get 15 minutes on the phone each week. On the flip side, here we are, the staff, trying to broadcast over whatever channels are available the goings on at camp. We upload photos to the camp website every day, videos about once a week. Now we are tweeting throughout the day. Why? I thought we were trying to get away from all that when we come here.

I remember going to camp as a camper, it wasn’t really that long ago (although some of our younger campers weren’t even born when I started going to camp). We didn’t have phone times when I was camper, you called your parents from pay phones on trip days, if you wanted to. We wrote letters as our major means of communicating with the outside world. I still write letters, by hand, with pen and paper when i come to camp. Sure, I can email and IM my friends and family while I am here, but there is something magical about putting pen to paper when you are here.

What does it say about where we are headed when I come to camp with a case of hard drives, DVD burners, video and still cameras, a computer, and an iPhone? Parents spend almost $10K to send one child to camp for 8 weeks. Then, as soon as the kids get here, the parents just want to hear from them. I usually have office duty one night each week. I take phone calls from parents and page kids to the office for their phone times. We also take phone calls during meals and have kids leave the meals to talk to parents, that seems somewhat odd to me as well. Maybe I don’t understand it because I never had it. Maybe I don’t understand because my parents were thrilled to get rid of me and my siblings for the summer!

So, does all this change camp? In some respects, yes, in others, no. Camp is still a get-away, a place that is very different from real life. Friendships are still as tight as ever here, and kids love to be here.

It is a very interesting thing to think about it, and certainly warrants some additional pondering as the summer goes on.