Again, even on the starships, there are limited number of holodecks and you see only the officers using them in general. in addition on DS9 Quark etc would rent them out, and they were expensive, so you can see that they are not available to anyone. Even the captain etc doesn't have his own holodeck to use anytime he wants.
And these are starships, so it makes sense that such resources would be even more in demand and used less often on actual earth etc (since the need for a holodeck on a space ship is obviously far greater).
Replicators etc do make most things easy to obtain but they are still powered by dylithian crystals or whatever, which are a valuable commodity, so yeah, even on earth there are still resource problems and restrictions on what you can use etc.
In the newest star trek show, the universe basically had a massive explosion type thing with warp drives or something and I think the Federation basically went poof (didn't watch the last season past the first few episodes but that was the gist I got). It's obviously at that point in time that resources are in short supply and even though technology has advanced the average person certainly isn't living in a eutopia at that point.
Anyway Star Trek seems to be one of the few futuristic shows where VR and holodecks etc have not caused the masses to become addicted etc, most others at least have it treated like a drug.
That just sounds like they ran out of ideas since it makes no sense.
ParanoidObsessive posted...
That's because the officers are the main characters, for the most part. It's generally implied that everyone on the ship gets at least some time in the holodeck. It's why you basically have to schedule your appointment rather than just stroll in whenever.
Again, our view of the universe is essentially warped because we're seeing a vast setting through a pinhole. Nearly every story we see is about one of a dozen or so people out of a crew of nearly 1000, on what is essentially one of the most elite flagships of the entire fleet, on their most "exciting" days (we don't get an entire episode to that one time Geordi La Forge took three days off to recover from space food poisoning where he spends most of the time on the toilet, or episodes where it takes them a week to get from one place to another and literally nothing else happens).
We never really see the show from the perspective of outsiders. Change your perspective and the entire context of the setting could change radically.
We should have.
ParanoidObsessive posted...
A lot of Star Trek falls into the "Methinks thou doth protest too much" sort of vein, even based on the standards of the time period it was made (rather than trying to judge it by the moral standards of decades later).
Like, they'll talk up how they're completely beyond prejudice or how they've totally done away with greed and money, but then you'll see a later episode where they're totally doing that thing they previously condemned as being primitive or something they've "moved past as a culture".
Again, it's what makes it so easy to recontextualize a lot of the "The Federation is so advanced and enlightened!" talk into ideological propaganda. They're really hypocritical way too often.
And that's not even getting into the thing that a lot of other people point out - namely, that it sometimes seems like literally no one in the Federation has advanced art or culture at all for the last few hundred years, with all the art and music or classic literature they ever talk about being stuff that's at least a hundred years or so old to us. About the most "modern" thing we ever see anyone ever engage in in the holodeck is on Voyager, where Paris is doing his 1930s sci-fi space opera thing, or Picard doing his whole film noir detective stuff. Everyone else seems to go back even farther (Sherlock Holmes, Shakespeare, Robin Hood), and most music seems to be older classical. We never get to see a 2400 AD version of Lady Gaga or The Weekend.
That would be because the writers didn't want to have to make up entire genres of new fiction or make up a hot about a "modern" movie. ---