Society - Written Wednesday, October 21, 2009 by Naumi Haque - 3 Comments

Welcome to the machine

There’s no shortage of techno-cautionary sci-fi literature out there, but the piece that recently caught my attention is remarkable in that it was written 100 years ago and yet is eerily relevant today. A few weeks back, Nick Vitalari referred me to the short story, The Machine Stops, by E.M. Forster. Written in 1909, it depicts a dystopian society in which all of humanity lives in underground compartments and all activities are mediated through the Machine (veritably predicting the basement-dwelling Internet nerds of today). People do not ever physically touch – it is deemed uncivilized and barbaric. Instead, the characters have access to many technologies that would have been hard to fathom at the time the story was written, such as e-mail (“pneumatic post”), video chat, and virtual classrooms, as well as social networking. Of the main character, Forster notes, “She knew several thousand people, in certain directions human intercourse had advanced enormously.” The concept of knowledge work is also introduced; characters crave “ideas” and exchange academic theories as a way to further society, “the Machine is the friend of ideas and the enemy of superstition.”

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