So there have been a number of episodes that I've watched recently - especially DS9 or earlier - where I can't help but think that if they were written now they would be resolved in 30 seconds or at least the "tension point" of the episode would be.
Two examples that come to mind are in Time's Arrow where the crew send Samuel Clemens back in time and are then wondering if he made it back - these days you'd just hop on Wikipedia or Google (maybe by the 2300's it is now called Googleplex to reflect the infinitely more vast amounts of data it is searching) and look up sighting of him, or books released by him, after the date he was meant to have returned.
Then in The Sound of Her Voice - obviously the twist is that the USS Olympia was actually lost a few year's prior. Surely though Starfleet would have clocked that a ship on an 8 year mission not having returned might be MIA and presumably there would have been a "flightpath" filed for their return so ships could have tracked along and found them presumably? Also as soon as they hear about the ship you look up their records, see when they set off, and then when told they were on an 8 year mission it would click that there is a time skip.
It feels like both of the above come from an era of non-instantaneous communications or access to information like we do now so the writers would not consider using it as a solution to it but by that point in time they should never not have historical, tactical etc data immediately available
Can anyone think of any other plots that fall apart thanks to modern technology?
Yeah, those examples do stick out.
In 'the sound of the voice' though, I guess it's 'possible' the crew not knowing about the USS Olympia could be explained as a problem of the Defiant being out of real time comms range with Starfleet - though this doesn't make sense because the information about another SF ship should be in the Defiant's database (not requiring live comms link to SF)... and each SF ship has a massive Federation database and most of related SF activities are updated in real time.
The only time real time updates might be 'suspended' or 'paused' are probably during comms silences, but given the time descrepancy on the Olympia's disappearance, etc., the information would have been available and in Defiant's computers for a long time).
For a SF ship that was seemingly disaptched 8 years ago, SF would have declared the ship officially lost about 2-3 years after the ship was not found (like they did with Voyager)... and given the Defiants crew was pretty much all vested into talking with the Olympia's captain, you'd THINK someone would have checked.
Also, why didn't anyone ask anyone in the episode on what's the stardate? The discrepancy alone would have raised red flags.
There's a supposed 'sloppiness' to a lot of episodes where the technology and information which is readily available simply speaking isn't used at all.
Given the situations at hand, you wouldn't need to wait for the captain to give the order, but it should really be standard procedure to check up on any information that there might be in the database relating to a given situation.
But everyone just WAITS for the captain to give the order to investigate something, and they just go about their business.
From what we saw, it seems a lot of SF captains are NOT that good at thinking up different possibilities about given situations... even though they should be by now. If it was a new captain, perhaps... but even then, the years they served in SF and the experience they gathered would have likely prompted SOMEONE to be a bit more pro-active.
