Friday, November 11, 2011

Freeze Blog Post #12

          Within "The Machine Stops" Forester creates a futuristic world that has a machine that basically does everything for the people who use it. This machine is basically life for people in the future. It helps them in the everyday world. It helps them communicate with one another in a virtual way, it helps them eat, dress. It basically does everything for them. Therefore, they don't need to pick up a finger to do anything. Kuno, the son of Vashti, called his mom up one day through the machine and wanted her to visit him. He is across the world from her so she says no. Her reasoning is that she can talk to him through the machine. The machine is basically the technology we have out today in this time period. Kuno doesn't believe that the machine is good and wants to communicate with him mom in person. His mom is caught up with the machine and denies. We are like Vashti. We don't realize the harm technology is doing to our lives. Kuno has more of a realistic view point and hates the machine. Kuno would most definitely be a person hating technology.
          Kuno sees the harm with technology and so therefore he becomes "homeless" in the story. Being "homeless" is living without the machine so basically without technology. For the second production I chose Wall-E. Wall-E is basically responding to how people are becoming more and more lazy with all of the technology advances. It also shows how the humans in the future are so distracted with their little own world within the technology.
           The two are very similar in the fact that it's both criticizing technology. Both are showing technology in a bad way that show how humans become incapable of helping themselves. The stories also both have a machine that does everything for them. They can video chat and get dressed all by the machine. The only really big difference that is between the two is that in Wall-E the machine is taking away from life and is distracting the humans from seeing the world around them.
            Wall-E is more for the kids and so it does have humor within a huge topic. "The Machine Stops" is a lot heavier and harder to understand, because it is such a weird topic of the future. Wall-E is also a movie while "The Machine Stops" is a short story. Therefore it's easier to understand Wall-E, but "The Machine Stops" has a lot of good ideas about the future and what it could possible look like.
              I don't believe that the future is going to become this bad, but there is a possibility. From what I think we are going to be more careful about the future, because we have all of these scary ideas. I think people are going to have implants in their heads which is a very scary thought. I personally don't even know what the future is going to look like, but I hope we aren't as lazy and incapable of communicating with one another on a face to face basis. From these two examples I think they would be more Utopian since everyone seems to be happy except for that one exception. The future is a very scary thought and with all of this new talk about what it's going to look like is even scarier.

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