Hmm. Well in my case it's not a conspiracy, just a continuation of what I view as an increasing lack of grand ambition (see the decline of space travel) and an increasing focus on the touchy feely issues like marriage and the environment at the expense of human rights, economics, and international affairs (not critiquing the importance of the certain issues, but rather that people think that the world can be ignored while they take care of their own immediate surroundings) . So I have tech advances focussing on wearables, along with an international affairs arena that has essentially been ignored and left to rot for decades until it bubbles over with violence.
So tech is advancing, just more focused on comfort. But the point is a good one in that I need a reason.
Can you clarify what you mean by a "channel"? I can see at least two definitions: - The local station that broadcasts on a specific part of the broadcast spectrum, and is usually part of a broadcast network. - An organization, usually a corporation, that provides content over some medium--cable or broadcast or network or something or other--and uses the word "channel" in its name. Like the Food Channel, for example. This seems like a rather narrow "by definition" definition. My TV already lets me go through menus and click on things, with my Tivo remote. There's no reason why it couldn't give me access to those articles, columns, YouTube videos, and so on.
In the future, TVs could come with a powerful enough AI to not only read aloud a text article or story, but also to generate realistic and appropriate voices for the characters as well as 3D models which interact with each other Navigating to a Shakespeare play, for example, would bring the characters to life on screen, complete with contemporary clothing, surroundings and body language. We're nowhere near that today, even with the most powerful computers, but who's to say it won't happen?
I'm thinking you might need a new critique group. The story is your vision, not theirs. How you think those things will shake out in the future is what matters. The suspense/romance author Nora Roberts writes a series of books (under the name J. D. Robb), about a New York City police detective that take place in 2060. Her world looks a lot like ours, except for a few techno-gadgets (the AutoChef, which seems to be a Star Trek-type replicator for food), and for a few names (cellphones are 'links, computers are comps.) and for occasional references to a vastly longer human lifespan. She doesn't try to explain these things, just mentions them when appropriate. Might be worth a look.
Ditto. While I have a hard time reading a lot of near-future SF because it's just today's world with a few names changed, that doesn't mean you should change your vision of the story just because other people say so. That said, the only time I've heard people refer to their phone as a smartphone is to distinguish it from my $25 Samsung dumb-phone. My real issue is that I can't see phones continuing to exist in the current form in twenty years; even today they're just small tablets with support for legacy voice interfaces. The PSTN itself is being replaced by VOIP interfaces once your phone line reaches the telco switch, and eventually the cellphone protocols will go too.
Yeah the smartphone verbiage is going away. I mostly left it in because I thought it would help readers, but if the reader s aren't helped then I have no argument Although I now will probably have at least one older character clinging to his dumb phone for dear life.
