So I'm just wondering, cause I never read about it in books and stuff, about a certain piece of technology. People refer to voxes that they use for communication, and pict-screens to read data on, but I never hear about something.... Well, about... Ah, why beat around the bush, is there television in the 41st millennium? And while we're at it, what about the Internet? I mean, it's gotta be pretty obvious that the Mechanicus has some sort of equivalent, but there's almost no mention of tv in the common world. Or in artwork. I never made a big deal about it, but I watched a sci-if movie recently where these guys are walking through some slums in a city at night, with bright neon lights and a giant screen in the distance playing advertisements and government messages and I thought "this is a hive city, I would totally have an adventure in here, that screen would be saying things like 'The Emperor watches, shirk not in your duty!'' And then I realized that I'd never really heard of tv screens like that. Which can't be quite right, I must've missed something.

Anybody have any answers? Is the Imperium that backward or have I been looking in the wrong places?

I always assumed the TVs were there, and people would watch the arena sports like colosseums (i read somewhere in a couple places the imperium has loads of those) or the daily newsaganda, and I understand that people use wireless connections to connect to each other's dataslates all the darn time, so they would have to be there in some form or another.

Suggestion: Wouldn't it be better to keep the discussion centred on a single place , and only use this thread to make other posters aware of it?

Some planets have infonets. They're very old and finiky things if I understand correctly.

TV is likely a thing in some places too, but you hear more about public vox systems.

If you want tvs and internet put them in, they'd be fairly advanced tech.

This is all personal opinion, but I got asked this question in the beginning our campaign.

Vox can also include pict screens as well. I'm sure that Days of Our Lives is still running. There are TV shows, reality shows, there are also Live shows as well. However, it is all organised and vetted by some subsection of the administratorium.

There are intranets. You can plug into a ship intranet, you can plug into an administratorium intranet, but all of these systems run independently and have numerous human cut outs to prevent you from accessing everything. There is no search function unless you are accessing a specific sub-system physically, and asking it the right questions.

There is no global vetting process either. Things like the Warhammer40k wiki or Lexicanum would be near mythical databases of information. Most information systems are filled with hyperbole to downright erroneous or out dated data as well.

Bug hunting or bug fixing doesn't happen. It either works, or it doesn't, and data entry is incredibly dogmatic.If you want to send an email even between departments it's better to print it out and have it hand delivered. if you wish to show pic captures of juvenile felines at your cubicle, you will have to do so with a dataslate you smuggled into the office.

There's a thing called pict caster, which is basically a 40K TV. And it's probably not mentioned that much do too cheer obviousness of existance of such a thing. So yeah, in the grim darkness of the far future there is also television.

Well, interstellar communication is astropath only, so Terranet and Cadianet are different things and will have completely different websites. Even if there's some kind of PraiseTheEmprah.imp that every planet is expected to keep up to date, they'll be getting those updates centuries apart, so you could be looking at a version of the site that's decades or centuries out of date. Planets within the same system will have a latency measured in minutes rather than milliseconds, so while it's possible to connect to Baal Primusnet from Baal Secundus, it's going to take minutes to load each webpage and you probably won't bother most of the time. Also, there's probably no such thing as Baal Primusnet because, like many planets in the 40k universe, it's a complete wreck and totally lacking in advanced technology. A lot of other planets in 40k are modeled after either post-apocalyptic or medieval settings, so television screens and infonets would be rare or non-existent on those worlds.

But some planets are hive worlds and are modeled off of things like Judge Dredd, 1984, or other dystopian literature (is Judge Dredd "literature?"), and television screens and infonets are perfectly appropriate to these planets. They may be more or less common, on some hiveworlds most people might only see a television screen when it's one of those Times Square style electronic billboards broadcasting propaganda and only high-ranking government officials get access to the infonet, whereas on other planets access to both might be as ubiquitous as it is in western Europe or the United States. In the latter case, you likely will get local Wikipedia/Google-esque sites that make it easy to find information known to that planet , but this will be only a trivially small fraction of the information available to the galaxy at large. If you went over a 40k Codex looking for what kind of information is available on Necromundapedia, odds are you'd get about two paragraphs from somewhere in the introduction and a stray sentence in the main text here and there, and then a whole lot of hearsay, propaganda, and misinformation. Macraggepedia probably has a pretty detailed article on the Ultramarines and you can probably even find the organizational details of a Codex compliant chapter and a partially complete list of Codex compliant chapters, basically what you'd expect from your average Space Marines Codex of whatever edition, but the Space Wolves article is a stub, the Horus Heresy article is locked and heavily disguised as being just another civil war, all mentions of Chaos are scrubbed from that and every other article, information on xenos are pretty much limited to "this is what an Eldar looks like, if you see one, call the PDF," etc. etc.

Of course there's TV. Rupert Murdoch is probably a High Lord of Terra.