Science Fiction versus Real Names

2022-01-06

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It's often pointed out that many of the devices in 19th- and 20th-century science fiction are now a reality. We have instant telecommunication devices; we have digital newspapers; we have flying machines; we have automatons that build things for us; we have self-driving quadricycles; we have superfood that survives wild climatic variation and is stuffed with nutrients. We even have ways of obliquely planting ideas directly in people's minds, through propaganda in the press and psychological manipulations in advertising.

If we have all these things, why doesn't the world feel like what we imagine science fiction worlds to feel like? There are many reasons for this, but I'm just going to focus on one aspect here: naming.

A ubiquitous element of science fiction is technology that doesn't exist in the real world. When readers or movie audiences see these tools for the first time, they'll naturally seem weird or confusing. Writers don't often come up with special names for the tech, unless it appears over and over again; instead the technology is named after its function. Characters will talk to each other on "transmitters" or "comms", travel on "hovercraft" or "starships", and fight with "proton torpedoes" or "plasma cannons". Only very prominent devices get special names, such as the Death Star or the T-800.

Naming conventions are different in the real world. In modern times, and especially in America, devices are rarely named after their function. Most products are made by companies that want to make money by selling them, so the products are given interesting or clever names that are more likely to stick in consumers' minds. It's not exciting to only refer to things by their function--and sometimes simply doing so is not enough, because many kinds of devices might do largely the same thing. For all these reasons, symbolic or creative names are chosen instead.

That's why we don't use our "pocket-sized radio-transmitting computers" to search the "global information database system" for the weather forecast; we use our "iPhone" to "Google" if it's going to rain tomorrow. We don't apply "adhesive medical wrap"; we apply "Band-Aids". We don't take a "pain relieving pill", we take an "Aspirin". We don't share information in any "international cultural exchange services"; we make posts on "Facebook", "Twitter" and "Mastodon". Even "Gemini" is a brand name, a name inspired by a technological state of affairs but not specifically reflective of what the protocol is or how it works.

This type of naming convention also pushes the functionality out of the fore, sometimes deliberately. Most people don't spend much time thinking about how their iPhone works or how Google produces the results it does. The more common questions are whether someone is an iPhone or Android user, whether people use Google or DuckDuckGo for their searches, or whether Facebook or Twitter is more or a time-sink. The principles, tools, and policies behind these products are obscured by brand loyalty, often by instilling strong feelings about a given product name, and the products develop more of an emotional presence in people's minds than a logical one.

I have to say I find this trend rather annoying. I don't care if items are given non-descriptive names, but I get frustrated when the names are used to obfuscate some aspect of the items. Science fiction makes no mystery of it, and that's part of what makes those worlds so interesting--the phenomenal power of the technology in the world is laid bare for a viewer or reader to comprehend. The real world seems to want to hide this depth of complexity and awesome power, which ultimately just serves as a way to control people. I think it also contributes to the apathy many people feel about the modern world.

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[Last updated: 2022-04-18]