This short story, “The Machine Stops” by E.M. Forster, is about the role technology has in media and its implications of how we experience anything through technological media. Media is any medium through which people experience something. Examples of media include movies, video games, web comics, and, in the case of this book, the Machine. The Machine serves as the sole medium for all interactions inside of your room, which ultimately becomes your world. Everything in Vashti’s life—her baths, her lectures, and her interactions with her son—was experienced through the Machine until she decided to meet him. The Machine was her only way of seeing the world from her room. She “had no ideas of her own[,]” but was fed them through the Machine (4). Seeing the world through only one medium—through the Machine: her world, her truth, her God—left Vashti robbed of her own ideas and removed her capacity to see the world her way. She wasn’t really interested in the process or the discovery of ideas, but only of ideas themselves. She notes this by criticising the system of the previous civilisation, which “had used [the system] for bringing people to things, instead
of for bringing things to people” (5). The process or discovery of these things is irrelevant, to Vashti. The only thing that mattered was the immediacy of the thing—the “truth” she wants.
While we aren’t exactly living inside of the Machine ourselves, there is something to be learned from Vashti and the Machine itself. Namely, how we see technological media. Technological media—and, in my opinion, media in general—should not be seen as a means to an end but an end in of itself. The mere process or discovery of conveying ideas, the media itself, is just as important if not more important than the destination or the “truth.” How a certain mode of media communicates its intended message or theme is crucial. What is lost in the Machine is this discovery or process through a contradictory indirect immediacy. The sea, the world above the ground, and the whole Earth itself is experienced through the Machine, yet this experience loses a significant part of its meaning. The Machine, as Vashti put it, “did not transmit nuances of expression[,]” as it instead reduced the interaction with technological media to a dogmatic and unilateral truth, for “[i]t only gave a general idea… an idea that was good enough for all practical purposes” (3). The particular context for this line was used to describe the lack of nuance to her son’s features when communicating through the Machine, but this idea can easily be extended to every experience users of the Machine have with the world they see through it.
To put it all in a single sentence: how you communicate a point is just as important, if not more important, than what you communicate through media.