Week 1: Response to “The Machine Stops” E.M.Forster — Yunhao Ye (Edmund)

In the novel, the author describes an advanced world filled with tons of machines and people who stay in their room for their whole life. In that world machine is the god to for the people, every movement they do depends on the machine and they feel ridiculous to leave those machines to see the outer world. Machine is the main structure in the society while people is only their worshipper who show the power of machine. Hence, people not live for themselves, they never do anything useful to the society because they do not need to. It is terrible to see such a situation where it seems that people control the machine while it is actually the machine that take control of people. And finally when the machine stops, everyone feels helpless for they cannot live without the machine.

Kuno is representative of the opinion which is normal in the real life but is thoughtful in the novel. He believes that people is always the main part of the world, people should measure and think in their own opinion but not what machine wants them to think. And we do not always need to seek help from the machine, he wants to talk in face to his mother and he wants to make an adventure on the earth. So what I think is that this novel has a insight towards future and its predict is also reasonable. People are now getting used to all kinds of machine, and our communication is mostly on the electronic devices, but we should remember that communication is always involved with people. And we should never forget the origin of communication — it is people talking with each other face to face.

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