Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Information Society: Fears and Doubts of Technological Utopia in Selected Serials of the Original Series
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Science fiction is a genre uniquely suited to considering the implications of technological developments. The long-running BBC series Doctor Who, by nature of its longevity, presents the opportunity to investigate evolving attitudes towards emerging information technology. This paper analyzes three serials from the original run of Doctor Who and traces the development in the show's portrayal of the future of information technology (IT) from 1967 to 1975. I argue that early portrayals of futuristic information societies, in serials such as “The Wheel in Space” and “The Seeds of Death,” take a mainframe-oriented view of IT's future and present a centralized, technocratic conception of the governments of the future. I conclude that the 1976 serial “The Deadly Assassin” dramatically reverses these earlier portrayals, demonstrating a perceptive awareness of the dawning of the microcomputer revolution and presenting a cynical take on the potential of technological advancement to lead to technocratic utopia.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".