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Star Trek PhD Thesis Wins Academic Prize
An anonymous reader writes "A PhD thesis based on Star Trek has won an Australian university's top academic prize. Dr Djoymi Baker's 90,000 word dissertation 'Broadcast Space: TV Culture, Myth and Star Trek' was awarded the University of Melbourne's Chancellor's Prize for Excellence in the PhD. Dr Baker watched over 700 Star Trek episodes — more than 624 hours — to investigate the relationship between ancient mythology and today's popular culture. American academics thought her research was 'superlative' and suitable for teaching."
I'm a doctor, not an editor! Not kill I.
It's an article, CmdrTaco, but not as we know it. Ahead mod factor five.
Finally Star Trek is gaining the academic recognition it so richly deserves. Having Trekology as an official subject for a BS degree should be coming up soon at all major mail order universities. Live long and prospers.
... did she successfully pass the Kobayashi Maru exam?
"A PhD thesis based on Star Trek has won an Australian university's top academic prize."
Now all we need is a PhD thesis based on several years of reading slashdot.
It is nice to think that at least today we KNOW that our myths are made-up.
But there are still some people who manage to insist they are real, actual events! - UFO religions like the Scientologists or heaven's gate.
Nonetheless, despite the fact that our current mythology is fiction, Star Trek and the like are at least Science Fiction: not based upon the supernatural, but instead upon testable, and currently tested theories and ideas.
Amazing: even as culturally advanced as we fancy ourselves, we still retain those ancient urges to believe in the fantastic. But
perhaps that's because so much in this universe is actually fantastic; far more, in fact, than we ever imagined.
It reminds me of one of my favorite quotes from the late, great Dr. Feynman: "Far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the
past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if
he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?"
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I did a cursory search for it, but only found references. Wether you like ST or not, it might be interesting given the title.
Someone hates these cans.
...is the idea that you could learn much about the relationship between anything and today's popular culture from the Star Trek TV franchise, which had been struggling to remain viable on any basis but nostalgia for years before it finally died.
But it is possible. There are (courtesy of tv.com)
79 Original Trek Episodes
178 Next Gen Episodes
176 Deep Space Nine Episodes
172 Voyager Episodes
98 Enterprise Episodes
Which totals 703 episodes. He didn't even need the 22 Animated Series episodes.
Wow.
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
Djoymi Baker watched 700 episodes - 624 hours without ads - of Star Trek and its spin-offs, dating from 1966 to 2005, in the name of research.
But for me it would be:
Anonymous Coward watched 700 episodes - 624 hours without ads - of pornography and its cum-shots, dating from 1966 to 2005, in the name of research.
...sounds like BS to me!
Dr Baker watched over 700 Star Trek episodes -- more than 624 hours -- to investigate the relationship between ancient mythology and today's popular culture.
Wouldn't reading Joseph Campbell's The Hero With A Thousand Faces been easier? This guy must've been a major slacker in school to watch that much Star Trek and still get a degree.
by using mythtv and having the
ads stripped out. A typical show, sans ads and theme music,
can be watched in 40 minutes reducing her watching time from
624 hours to 466 hours.
Did you watch them with Rosey Palm? In that case, you have earned your tagline; "To go bald where no man has gone bald before..."
Popular bittorrent sites have noted a huge spike in Star Trek episode downloads over the last 12 months...
Today's weirdness is tomorrow's reason why. -- Hunter S. Thompson
Watch closer. The whole of ST:TOS was an exploration of the Human Condition. It just happened to take place in space, ergo it was "Sci Fi".
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
Finally Star Trek is gaining the academic recognition it so richly deserves. Having Trekology as an official subject for a BS degree should be coming up soon at all major mail order universities. Live long and prospers.
Maybe some day those who embrace the Federation's Ideals can be accepted on a jury or even in public office.
stardate 2006.828 i've successfully been elected to the town school board. the squabbling is terrible and nothing ever gets done. i've never felt in need of a phaser so much in my life.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Even the new Battlestar Galactica has more mythology and philosophy than any of the Star Trek series.
I'm a doctor, damnit, not a Star Trek addict!
to investigate the relationship between ancient mythology and today's popular culture.
Star Trek? My bet would be that the first few seasons of Star Gate would give much more away on that.
bash$
How is this any less valid than a PhD surrounding the works of Shakespeare? It could be reasonably argued that the collected episodes of Star Trek represent a far larger body of work, that they do indeed influence pop culture substantially and serve as a superb mirror for the social attitudes of contemporary society.
Mind, my PhD is in Computer Science, so all that humanities stuff is more or less the same to me. If you can't code it, it isn't good enough!
Man even /. is getting sensationalized.
First the news media is about to soil it's collective shorts about some Tropical Storm Ernesto which no one seems to know where its going.
And now we see a title in an article about a "Star Trek PhD Thesis"
Isn't this kind of stupid? The paper was NOT about star trek. Star Trek episodes were nothing but a research tool used to access a much deeper level of human culture.
What's next? Someone writes a thesis on psychological and physiological symptoms and causes of game addiction and uses WoW as a study medium? I can see the headlines: "World of Warcraft PhD Thesis roxxors my boxxors"
Star Trek "priest": "And Scotty beamed them to the Klingon ship, where there would be no tribble at all"
Crowd chants: "All power to the engines!"
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Why watch them - why didn't she do a text analysis of the scripts/director nots and compare this to other texts? Watching seems subjective and a tremendous time suck. Am I missing something?
It is correct... but the first definition that came to my mind, given the 624 hours of Star Trek, was "Excessive."
Superlative.
Consciousness is a myth. Trust me.
Dude, you should just say CON, because the long OO sound makes it sound like your putting down our indigenious people.
Abstract: In the spirit of the best human qualities, Anonymous Cowards seeking public yet anonymous recognition show formidable selflessness. By doing away with the link between benevolent exposure of ideas and karma gratification they elevate public commentary to a social reinforcement of Insightful, Interesting and Funny: all essential components of high achievements. This in turn strengthens the Blog medium with not only cohesive forces but justifies the Anonymous Cowards with legitimacy beyond what have been observed throughout the history of the Internets. Their willingness to start from scratch over and over yet still earn the respect of their peers hardly justifies the "coward" epithet and proves that comments, even at -1, are a gold mine for those seeking understanding of TFA.
We will show that Anonymous Corwardiness is alive and well and that despite sometime adverse moderation, this modern tradition offers by its unique qualities a look inside the human soul.
Outside of his role he should be addressed as WILLIAM SHATNER, not KIRK.
I agree. What a waste of someones creative energy. When there are so many problems in the world this person goes and writes a Phd on star trek. Worst thing is all the rest of the academics agreed and awarded the prize.
-- Cheer, Cheer, The Red and the White.
And to reinforce those in each generation.
Myths tell us what is "good" and what is "bad".
There was nearly no over-arching Myth, but many of the episodes had mythic elements, some altogether too literally. (Remember when our intrepid crew encountered the actual, factual Greek God Apollo?)
But you miss the main point, which is thanks to the magic of Deconstruction, you can read anything you want into anything you want. So of course Star Trek has embedded myth, any embedded myth you want. It also contains deep wisdom about how post-feminist transgendered dialogs can be resolved in a quasi-imperialist milieu steeped in the rhetoric of oppressive patriarchial systemic dynamics in a quantum mechanical universe, if you look hard enough.
Isn't literary criticism fun?
(Yes, I know it's 'The Original Series')
While there are 703 episodes, that doesn't translate into 703 hours or Trek because of commercials. In order for her to watch 624 hours, each episode has to be at least 53.26 minutes long. Although the amount of commercials shown in an hour varies by time and station, it almost undoubtably is more than 7 minutes/hour.
Excessive? No! This is how I define "unwarranted"!
Well, your point would be a little more effective if the quote you gave was actually from Shatner, rather than a Saterday Night Live skit.
The website you gave *was* http://snltranscripts.jt.org/
Deconstruction has serious issues and there are very few people who live by it at all -- its interesting from an academic perspective but not at all useful in the real world.
... I'll drive right through it"
"That stop sign might mean to stop blinking
The nearly static meanings of things within a language and region allows for the development of culture at all. Sure, reinterpretation takes place, but its still very slow compared to say the changes in fashion culture.
PS. Star Trek contains many overarching myths that are in the background and understood by all those who watch the show. Ask someone who grew up watching Star Trek whether they believe in, for example, the right to a fair trial. Many things were communicated in Star Trek as normative without being necessarily overbearing and influenced those who watched it.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
What's really amazing here is that Djoymi Baker is female. Die-hard ST fans weren't known often for being of the fairer sex.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Trek's been mined for college papers since Chekhov was in diapers. With -- what, 4, 5, six series, how many movies? -- from which to draw, you could prolly choose a thesis premise via a dartboard and still find enough material in the Star Trek mythos to hang it all on.
The real, industrial-strength pseudo-scholars who want to watch TV rather than crack a book turn their tight-leather-clad attention spans toward Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
And I know from pop culture pseudo-scholarship: I once got an "A" in my "Structuralism and Semiotics" class with an exegesis of an Elric of Melnibone short story.
Ahhhh, college...
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
And where can this thesis be read?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Culture is culture. If no one looks at culture of the present day, we lose a lot of valuable information. You're basically saying it's OK to abolish the study of culture at the university level. And while I am not personally interested in Star Trek, I do think that it has had an amazing influence over a large portion of the general population, and studying that effect is definitely worth the effort. And I wouldn't be surprised if someone doesn't look at the effect of the Simpsons on our civilization. Ignoring the mundane details that describe our culture means ignoring the essence of culture as a whole.
I'll form my OWN solar system! With blackjack! And hookers!
No, no, no. Not 'shitty'. The term you're looking for is 'Shatty'.
Good. Cheap. Fast. Pick Two.
My next thesis:
"A Contemporary Study of The Effects of the Application of Sensationalist Material into Specialist Media Channels"
Star Trek contains many overarching myths that are in the background and understood by all those who watch the show.
Yeah, I realized as soon as I hit "submit" that that was a bit strong.
What I meant was that there was no overarching "story" that was this one gigantic myth. Star Trek, being written by a lot of people with a lot of beliefs over a lot of time, certain does have recurring themes, but for any given overarching theme you can find an episode that seems to contradict it.
It had strong tendencies but is actually fairly incoherent if you really watch what the shows are saying. (While I'm normally really critical of Star Trek, I don't mean that as a critism; reality is incoherent too.)
Shouldn't that be KHAAAN!!!?
This just proves that PhD stands for "piled higher and deeper."
Not all PhD's. But in this case...I'm a little inclined to agree. No offence to the talented and fetching Dr. Baker, but here are the other three winners of the U of Melbourne's Chancellor's Prize of Excellence:
(1) "Penelope Smith (Social Sciences), who used economic modeling to better understand business cycles in Australia and large Group of 7 economies - drawing information which is critical for setting fiscal and monetary policy."
(2) "Martin de Jonge (Science and Engineering) whose work will lead to more incisive synchrotron x-ray studies that are 100 times more accurate than current levels."
(3) "Christopher Smith (Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences) who identified the cell which encourages the body's immune system to fight the herpes simplex virus."
Seems like a wee bit more serious and useful work. On the other hand, clearly Baker is a right clever jane, having figured out how to get the yeomanry of 'Stralia pay her a handsome stipend for five years while she watches her favorite TV show and takes notes. Well done, lass! You have to admire that kind of panache.
ROTFL. Man that was funny!
News about the Kettle Open Source project: on my blog
That's the beauty of college these days, Tommy! You can major in Game Boy if you know how to bullshit."
-- James 'Droz' Andrews (played beautifully by Jeremy Piven) in PCU.
to Truly understand the thesis, you must read it in its original Klingon.
...how important intelligent communication is. While a topic like 'TV Culture, Myth and Star Trek', in my opinion, does not provide a revolutionary breakthrough in the study of humanities, the fact that she intelligently and effectively enumerates and supports her argument is enough to merit the award she received.
Faith is a willingness to accept something w/o complete proof and to act on it. Reason allows you to correct that faith.
All facets of culture? My sympathies to the poor researcher that has to view every "Saved by the Bell" episode to get his thesis.
*shudders*
Maybe not "Trekology" per se, but Star Trek can be used as a subject in any course of mythology, semiotics, discourse analysis, etc. When I was in college, my final project for some Literary Theory class (was it stylistics?) was about "The Ketchup Song". Postmodern linguistics treat everything as a text, so there is nothing surprising about choosing Star Trek as a subject.
It keeps boldly going, and going, and going where no one has gone before: Aussie sheepskin...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I meant would, not wouldn't.
I'll form my OWN solar system! With blackjack! And hookers!
Be realistic, most jobs contribute in their way. If everyone researched cancer, we'd all starve to death and swim around in our sewage. If people didn't have a few moments to sit back and relax with a book or a show, we'd all be the poorer for it -- not just in quality of life but how often does it happen that a random thing seen or read, of no apparent value, will spark an important thought? Ms. Baker will be teaching people how to make movies or videos. That has value, just as the farmer growing food, or the plumber fixing toilets, or the researcher solving a cancer puzzle, each have value in their own way. Everything is inter-related and inter-dependant.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
One person at my college did their senior thesis (typically 100+ pages) on the history of Nintendo.
Well guess what. Harvard has a course in analyzing the simpsons, or so I've heard.
trekspeak and submitted that, and probably still won!
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
Does she include the films in that? I think it's widely accepted that The Wrath of Khan explores the human condition far better than any of the latter series.
"No, no, no, don't tug on that! You never know what it might be attached to."
I'm aiming for my PhD in Political Science... after reading this I feel less embarassed for wanting to design a course called 'The Politics of Star Wars' Bonus points if your final makes significant mention of the Wookiees.
Star Trek Inspirational Posters
s p.html
http://echosphere.net/star_trek_insp/star_trek_in
Enjoy slashdotters!
Please don't Slashdot this site, this guy needs donations.
Not only is she both a smartie AND a Trekkie, she's a hottie.
O lord, bless this thy holy hand grenade, that with it thou mayest blow thine enemies to tiny bits, in thy mercy.
Funny you should mention Shakespeare and coding ...
Star Trek was a huge cultural phenomenon for years after its cancellation. It was fans that got Paramount to wake up and make the first Star Trek movie. Terms like "Beam me up, Scotty" were part of pop culture well before the franchise was reborn in 1979.
In this respect it is akin to Tolkien's works, which enjoyed widespread popularity for decades before Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies were a smash hit. The Rankin/Bass Hobbit movie and Bashki's ill-fated Lord of the Rings film didn't diminish the cultural impact of the books. Most people have never read them, but everyone knew what a Hobbit was well before Jackson's screen version arrived.
I think the distinction here is that popular culture is not just the sum of a series of transitory flashes in the pan that are only remembered as nostalgia. Star Trek first was seen in the 1960s, but I think most people think of the Star Trek universe as a concept unto itself, rather than an artifact of a particular time in American history. Star Trek seems to have the same appeal and cultural reach, and it would be hard to argue that The Lord of the Rings is the product of the 1960s (when it first became popular on a wide scale) or the early 21st century (when the movie was released).
Brittney Spears, et. al., while commercially successful and visible everywhere in pop culture, will likely be associated in the future with the 2000s. Star Trek, while less obvious, is still there, and still relevant, if less obvious.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
I'm glad it's not just me who thought that!
Seriously, I worked my ass off to pass calculus and thermo exams, and some guy does this? I suppose you either give him the highest award or take the public relations blow when it comes out that you allowed that 'study' in your university.
Think I'm a troll? If this happened in America people would be screaming about the failing quality of American educational standards.
Needle Nardle Noo
Tom: What's he doin?
Droz: He's finishing his senior thesis. Pigman is trying to prove the Caine-Hackman theory. No matter what time it is, 24 hours a day, you can find a Michael Caine or Gene Hackman movie playing on TV.
Tom: That's his thesis?
Droz: Yes! That's the beauty of college these days, Tommy! You can major in Game Boy if you know how to bullshit.
Reference: PCU
require "something.clever";
The real, industrial-strength pseudo-scholars who want to watch TV rather than crack a book turn their tight-leather-clad attention spans toward Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
You're not challenging Dr Baker's bona fides, are you? Check out this Buffy Scholar!
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
Next thing they'll be making J.R.R. Tolkien the foremost author of the 20th century.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Bloody brilliant! A trekkie who can spell Khan correctly, but can't spell 'learn'.
Genius...
# man tar
Cramer is also the guy who developed the Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics.
IANAP, alas, but if I understand it properly, it explains the weirdness such as the two-slit experiment and Schroedinger's Cat.
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
Seems like a wee bit more serious and useful work.
Dunno.
It's been famously stated that those who do not study history are condemned to repeat it. I'd suggest that those who do not study myths are condemned to act them out.
Many of may have been taught abouth myth in this way: Myth is obsolete science. Zeus is just a primitive mind's way of explaining lightning without the benefit of understanding electricity. I know I was taught this way. However, if you look at a myth like Cupid and Psyche, it's obviously not the product of a primitive mind. Myths are what they are, but the do serve a very practical purpose in allowing us to relate the world to the subjective experiences and responses that make up our identity.
We're currently fighting a war whose root causes are clearly in the economics of petrolum and regional politics. But what sustains the war (on both sides) by a mythical theme: the alien who wants to destroy our way of life. This is the alien of "War of the Worlds". This is "the Hun". This is not the alien from ET.
One of the most popular terms in US political discourse these days is "islamo-fascism". Notice that while this term is technically inaccurate when applied to Al Qaeda's goals, it is mythologically potent, combining the alien (islam) and the threatening (fascism). This is not to say Al Qaeda isn't alien and threatening! It's just to say the term is more emotionally loaded than technically accurate. Framing your thinking in terms of the mythical theme of alien invasion means you mischaracterize the other's intentions. The other party's real intentions may be just as bad, or even worse, but it doesn't change the point: allowing one mythical theme to dominate your thinking about a situation means you act more in accord with the mythical paradigm than specific facts of the case.
What does this have to do with Star Trek? Well, it doesn't necessarily have to have any immediate use. There is no immediate use for studying the genetics of a fruit fly, but the knowledge gained from that study is valuable indeed. It's clear to me that TOS and TNG have connected with many people, many intelligent people, in a deep way, a way which subsequent series like Voyager and Enterprise failed to, although individual episodes may fall below or rise above the others in any of the series. This in itself is no doubt mysterious to the company that produced them. Which means we are in some sense in a state of ignorance, the wealth of theories regarding this notwisthstanding. There are always plenty of theories available when you are in a state of ignorance. So serious scholarship is certainly called for. It may provide useful fundamental results, or it may not, but it is at least of interest to those whose jobs it is to provide mythologically potent entertainment.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Thats part of the point. The study is meant to connect modern culture and myth, not modern television shows and the made up myth that comes with them.
Next year someone will win a prize for a dissertation on The Simpsons and how Homer embodies the best and worst of American men.
Well duh.
Of course he does. The problem is that the creators of the Simpsons make it look easy to create such a character. Which it is not.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
grr, rtfa.
It's a thesis on how storytelling and mythology has changed over time from what I've gathered, and the reason star trek was an obvious choice is that it's a fictional story-telling show that's been running since 1966.
That's a LOT of data. (no pun)
The reality we populate today is a collective dream. You walk away from the lamp post, and it stays the same when you come back. That's clarity, that the grand, stupendous trick. The subconscious mind is incredibly aware, of far more than we actively realize. --It knows all of the objects and events of this world backwards and forwards in time. When you dream alone, reality is fluid because it's just you pulling it together. When there are a few billion dreamers, the edges get pretty tight and reliably there.
Everything is just energy after all, and energy is the stuff from which awareness both springs and is self-created. Somewhere out there, there are millions of people envisioning our version of reality with great joy and attention. We are created through this process. Or so I think.
Every story is a mirror of our own collective psyche; So of course You can determine where a society is in terms of spiritual evolution based on the stories it tells. Star Trek is about voyaging into god, trying to solve the great mystery through our collective gathering around the camp fire of humanity to tell stories. Anybody who derides the study of the stories we tell ourselves is missing the meta game by a zillion miles.
-FL
she gets to say, "I'm a Doctor, Jim, not a physician"!
You may all go to Hell and I will go to Texas - Davy Crockett
It seems we've been spoiled by continuity in sci-fi and (especially) fantasy (since that's often more overtly myth-building). Ancient myths had no overarching story either. They were diverse traditions, often passed on orally, that embodied certain cultural values. Far from coherent. Some of the sources that have come down to the modern day have strung together (or at least tied in) several myths, but even they don't agree with each other. (Often it comes out resembling modern comics, in the way they have endless crossovers and reboots and Wold Newton families. C'mon, the Argonauts were the ultimate comic-book "League" of heroes.)
Star Trek has a much more coherent, "overarching" quality that the word myth should suggest. (The great-great-grandparent made an even bigger mistake: the "myth" is not the "backstory". It's the values of the culture and how they're embedded in the story.) I've naturally not read this thesis, unfortunately, but I wouldn't be surprised to find that some mention is made of the difference between TV myth and ancient, oral myth. (I did catch the news story last night, which featured a tubby guy in Starfleet uniform for no apparent reason, as well as some actual discussion from the author on what her thesis was about. She said she chose Star Trek because its production spanned forty years of culture.)
"That's that shitty TV show my dad used to watch."
I dare you to name a show you like to watch.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
- "Warp Factor Six, Mr. Sulu"
- "Set phasors on Stun"
- "Beam me Up, Scotty"
Dilithium, tribbles, vulcan everything, photon torpedos, ship-caliber phaser-blasts putting a whole town to sleep, alien technology that was never capitalized on (turning people into cubes, romulan cloaking) and blue beer. Q, the boundlessness of the holodeck. Interstellar gateways, time paradoxes and spacetime rifts, planet-eating drones, energy beings.Star Trek was SF. It was ASTOUNDINGLY speculative, often at levels that tax even MY optimism on our ability to advance even in a million years (The Transporter, specifically). But at least it portrayed science and discovery in a positive light. Let's just agree it did yeoman's work in true-SF habit of using fictional/future science to awaken questions, explore ethical challenges... and stop there.
Actually, it's 7 series if you count both the animated series (gag!) and the new internet-only "New Voyages" series (has potential).
My first thought when talking about TV shows about space travel and ancient myths would, of course, bye Stargate, not Star Trek. Granted, the 'Gates (mostly SG-1, but Atlantis does have, well, Atlantis) tend to twist the mythology of the week in some pretty odd ways some time, but they tend to pull from myths pretty offten.
Of course, Thor, Norse god of thunder, really being an alien of the same species that crashed at Roswell is completly true. The government just got the writers to put it into the show for plausable denyability. The same thing is true for the plots of episodes #100 and #200. They were just hanging laterns on the fact.
#include <signature.h>
Troll? I guess there are some very sacred cows here on /. You're hardly the first person to think this, but I suppose there are some things that just can't be said around here.
And the brethren went away edified.
I don't think anyone would argue with the notion that watching television exposes one to more pop culture than reading a book. The point is that watching entertainment television should not generally be considered legitimate scholarship. This is the price that academia is paying for both "postmodernism" and the concentration in the humanities on cultural studies. Suddenly, works of art are no longer valued for their real content; they are valued for their insight into culture. In the past, popularity gave way to quality and bad art faded away because it had no lasting value. People who engage corporate entertainment on a scholarly level are just propagating meaningless garbage. Part of the problem is that these people aren't doing anything significant. I mean the "academics" who are studying pop music and television. They are searching for something unique or new. The other part of the problem is that some very good art is bound to be forgotten because we accept the opinions of trained historians and analysts, many of whom are too busy carving out a niche for themselves instead of stepping up and addressing the content of works as opposed to their cultural impact. I'm not saying that Star Trek doesn't quote or borrow from mythology, but that doesn't make Star Trek or any other television show itself worthy of graduate study. I'm also not saying that it has no absolute artistic value. Just being on television doesn't make it bad in the artistic sense, but the mere fact that people watch it shouldn't make it a legitimate topic of study. The GP was, if I understand correctly, making a statement about how lame academia has become. I agree. I know people doing PhD dissertations in things like pop music who probably couldn't pass a 9th grade algebra test. They truly are pseudo-scholars, they can't hack it in the world of the heavy-hitting academics, and they don't belong there.
There are 10 kinds of people in the world: That averages about 660,000,000 of each kind.
I couldn't disagree more. Star Trek hasn't just been a passive part of our culture, it has had a distinct impact on the development of our society. Many new technologies that we are realizing today were at one point fictional devices that existed only in the Star Trek universe (think communicators/cell phones). Star Trek has been credited for inspiring some researchers down the path that eventually lead or is leading towards making those technologies a reality. Watching the Enterprise go to warp 9 was enough to convince some impressionable youths to become physicists and study how to make warp travel possible. It has raised the interest of several generations for space exploration. To act as if there is no value to studying the social impact of Star Trek is extremely ignorant. (and this is coming from someone who is more of a Star Wars fan.)
I never said I was smart, I just said I was smarter than you
I like this guy's stuff - http://www.bfi.org.uk/filmtvinfo/researchers/mirr/ researcher/300. His
paper on Lord of the Rings-based sexploitation movies at last-year's
Tolkien-2005 conference was, er, unique. As was the video-show at the party
afterwards.
It is a great PHD. The finest excuse a student could come up so he can abuse the university's network to download all the Star Trek torrents, as well as spent his hours viewing all the episodes.
When there is an opening for Bored Housewifes, please call me. I'll be here all week.
True History, by Lucian, 120-180 AD.
Reduce, reuse, cycle
This just proves that PhD stands for "piled higher and deeper."
Nonsense! Everybody knows it stands for "Permanent Head Damage" =)
It's been done.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
And then what about Star Gate SG1? Modern Mythology? Which of course brings to mind The Matrix Movies. Indeed, one might wonder if in 300 years the new empire won't pick up those movies and make a state religion out of them...
It is nice to think that at least today we KNOW that our myths are made-up. But there are still some people who manage to insist they are real, actual events! - UFO religions like the Scientologists or heaven's gate.
More prevalent myths believed today: genesis, the garden of eden, the virgin birth, the resurrection of Jesus, God.
Well, it shows the value of being able to manipulate your instructors to let them let you do as you please.
I didn't like any of the topics one of college English profs gave out...I kept working on her till I convinced her to let me do mine analyzing the lyrics of Rolling Stones songs. I got away with it...and made an "A". It actually was a lot of fun...research was a breeze as that I was (and still am) a big fan.
Now...if only I could convince my bosses at real jobs to let me do what I want to do....ahh...I miss the old easy school daze...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
"Grand Total: 32631 minutes (543 hours, 51 minutes) That's 22 days, 15 hours and 51 minutes of Star Trek. Not bad..." from former post, and "Djoymi Baker watched 700 episodes - 624 hours without ads" from parent. so how did Djoymi Baker watch 624 hours, when there is only 543 and 51 min? how does 624 = 543 ?
What magical place do you come from where Michael Moorcock's work is considered "pop culture"? :-)
This is just another notch in the continuing decline of academic standards. Just like a large fraction of California students cant pass a sixth grade level math test and are refused graduation, all the way up to third rate college professors.
Apparently, you are a little bit on the outside of these discourses, looking in, because there are two very distinct approaches to cultural material that you seem to be confusing, and "postmodernism" is only tangentially related to both of them.
An intentional indifference to the question of the "quality" of a work is the hallmark of cultural studies as developed by British academics in the 70's and 80's, and it is one of two ongoing approaches to popular culture (and insofar as cultural practices are pretty much pervasively tied up with questions of markets, all culture can be seen as "popular;" it's just a question of who the people that use that culture are.) This approach takes as a given that culture is being produced by a culture-industry, and then sees what people do with that fact. A lot of the focus on fan communities, on "subversive" readings, on the role that audiences play in communicating their desires to the market, comes from this tradition.
The other approach is the critical theory approach identified with the Frankfurt School, which pretty much sees the consumers of popular culture as dupes, and sees Star Trek and such as commodities which reinforce the dependent position of the audience; that if you unpack these media products, you find that they ultimately comply with the assumptions and ideology which dominates the modern world. Theorists like Theodor Adorno were very much of the view that very few works were of enough aesthetic value to resist being reduced to a commodity: he largely shares your apparent view.
But you don't recognize this as a current argument within academia. And you characterization of academics in the humanities is simply incorrect - the hardest working scholars that I know are in the humanities. I went back for a humanities PhD after a career in the software industry, with a technical background and the ability to program. I know how to do calculus. And in my experience, it's as easy, or easier, to "fake it" or cruise by with a minimal effort in the sciences as in the humanities. For every Sokal hoax, there is a Bogdanov affair. The difference is that no one awarded Sokal a PhD in the humanities.
My impression of the the dissertation is actually that it is thin; saying that "Star Trek borrows from mythology" is really kind of jejune. A more interesting historicization of popular culture is Angela Ndalianis' "Neobaroque Aesthetics and Popular Entertainment."
Hummm, Measure of a Man is one of my favorite episodes. (Or at least the "potential it had" is. . .)
." How do we (as a society) want to be regarded/known by the other races "out there" amongst the stars. . .?
I never took "Does Data have a Soul" as the central theme. . . to me the focus was always in the other direction, at society itself.
"IF" there is "some possibility" that Data has a soul. . . do we want to be the type of race that takes the chance and subjects this individual (and the others like him to come) to, what essentially consititutes slavery? The diminishment of the individuals very worth, to simple property?
It wasn't so much about what Data was/wasn't. Or what he had/didn't have. It was about society's responsibility to "choose its own moral path and stick to it. .
IMHO
No, I don't remember your name. But the memory mapped screen on a TRS80 from 1977 is from 15360 to 16383 if that helps.
You say that like it's a bad thing.
You say that like it's a bad thing.
Depends on how amusing you find watching the academic guardians of high culture fall in to a fit of gibbering apoplexy.
I suppose it beats TP-ing the Dean's front yard.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
These Trekademics* (that's right, a new word and you heard it first from ol' Xylene); Why don't they get seriously intellectual and write about The Matrix?
If one can dig a PhD from Trek, surly there's a Nobel in The Matrix somewhere...
*I'm heading right over to the Wikipedia to define this!!
You managed to use "die-hard Star Trek fans" and "sex" in the same sentence.
Congratulations.
Q: What did the comedian say to the crowd?
A: If I knew, this joke would be funny.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
As to the first part Ricky/Lucy vs. Kirk/Uhura, which is the greater blow for equality? Even granting hispanics getting a somewhat better deal than blacks, I would think showing a hispanic married to a white woman (and from everything I saw in Lucy it was pretty much treated as no big deal), eventually having a child, etc. is probably further along the equality path than a "fling" of about 3 minutes of kissing that's forgotten in the next episode. Even granting the difference between hispanics and blacks in the 1950's/1960's it's still not as Paramount wants people to think -- that ST was on the vanguard of civil rights. I'm tired of the claim, as well as some of the other alleged "social justice" things.
But it's a common thing with Trek. Unlike other "culturally impacting" TV/movies, almost all of Trek's claims seem to come years after the fact. With Harry Potter or Da Vinci Code, I can point to news articles and documentaries produced fairly soon after the release: "Does Harry Potter encourage Witchcraft?", "Is there any Truth Behind the Da Vinci Code", "Should Christian Children read Harry Potter?", etc. Each one speculating about the cultural impact of these books. We had news reports of kids standing in line for the the next HP book. That isn't something JK Rowling came up with 5 years after, or even 10 years after. It happened while the HP series was being written. I've never seen the same for Trek, although it seems (almost) to be credited with starting the Hippy movement altogether, as well as the invention of everything up to (and probably soon added to the trek-list) Blu-Rays. Sorry, but no. Roddenberry isn't a prophet, and ST didn't change the world.
Maybe we just disagree on what Cultural Impact is. I think it needs to reach a bit higher to be a cultural impact. Show me a anti-war protester in a Starfleet uni, and I'll believe in St's impact. Until then, I'm not convinced. It's a fictional TV show given far too much credit as a force in America. Other than for the few for whom ST is a Bible or Quran, it's probably less influencial than Star Wars, Harry Potter, and Simpsons.
Oh, and because I forgot to address this bit:
:)
Like masturbation teaches one about sex? I think not.
This is Slashdot. Thousands of people here pray it does.
Yup...
Okay, I apologise if the post isn't totally coherant, as it is being composed at 1:00am.
No need, my friend. It's a very cogent argument, and very well expressed.
I do not think I disagree with you very much at all, if you will permit me to add that our primary sources for what people or cultures are like should be factual accounts of what happened, if they exist. I do agree that reading Hemingway adds important depth to one's understanding of the Spanish Civil War, or reading Isherwood adds a lot to one's understanding of Weimar Berlin, but only after you've got the basic facts of what happened in your head. If you know nothing about those times, your impression is not very good. Reading only Slaughterhouse Five to learn about the Second World War would give you an absurdly skewed view. And, if you must choose -- this is really my only point -- I think the factual resources are always better.
I'm not quite sure the ancient epics fit in the same category as modern art, because they were very consciously intended to convey historical truth as well as entertain and propagandize. Art isn't quite the same when it must be society's memory, too. It's also not quite true that all we have of Mycenaen Greece is Homer. There's archaeology, too. Can we agree that you can learn a lot from all of a society's preserved shards?
Nevertheless, on the whole I think you've made a persuasive argument for calling what's-her-name's work on Star Trek some kind of scholarship, or at least saying it could be, if done right. So, you win.