Category: Communications Lab

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Week 1:Response to E.M. Forster (Winny Wang)

Response to E.M. Forster

When we imagine about the future, people can’t neglect the question that where we are going and whether there is an end. The sci-fi story The Machine Stops by E. M. Forster offers the answer of a catastrophe; and while it is the end of the life of an entire generation, it is not the end of humanity. This brings readers deep questions on technology-based life style and what is necessary for living as a human being.

The saddest element in this story is that people ditch the significance of living. They keep themselves alive in artificial cages where their basic needs are satisfied in a world with no reality. Being born and raised with the extreme dependence on the Machine, people lose senses and feelings, they forget the ways of communication, they even lose their natural rights to experience in real world. Although forms of interaction like talking and observing still exist, society has collapsed into isolated units. Without connection and communication, people are just flesh that consume resources. The point of humanity is lost.

The fall-down of the world and the hope held by Kuno in the end leaves readers a strong impact. It might be hard to visualize the destination when we first start the journey of machinery revolution, but it is a must to keep in mind that “Man is the measure”. Man should never forget senses and communications, or pass the bottom line that let go of the core of humanity. The world may be manipulated, but there will still be one last man standing for humanity, just like “scraps of the untainted sky” Kuno saw before they joined the history made up by dead lives.

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Response to E.M. Forster – Matthew Ballou

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.

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Response to E.M Forester’s The Machine Stops – Justin Chen

The Machine Stops by E.M Forester is a dystopian short story that centers around the human reliance of what our protagonist and others in that universe calls, the machine. In this fictional piece, human civilization has reached a sense of utopia. Every aspect of human life from entertainment to basic necessity has been managed by the machine. While the machine may be beneficial to these humans, the short story also goes into depth of the shortcomings regarding human society in general. One of those shortcomings centered around the lack of human touch and physical contact. The society in The Machine Stops has progressed to the point where holographic communications between two people are possible. While holographic projections of humans may seem to be the pinnacle of communication, not all seem to enjoy this medium to communicate. The protagonist’s son states “I hear something like you through this telephone, but I do not hear you.” In this brief exchange between the protagonist and her son, we can see how her son is dissatisfied by this medium. He wants to see her mother in person in order to have that personal interaction. The fact that while this was written in 1906, E.M Forester was able predict problems that modern day society face today. Currently, the digital age has progressed our ways of communication but at the same time has left people more lonely than over. A research has been done to show how the youth of today have far less social skills compared to older generations. The problem is attributed to consumption of a media such as phones or computers. Another interesting part of that dystopian society is the social norm to not come in physical contact with one another.  For example, the flight attendant was ridiculed when she made physical contact with our protagonist in order to help her when she tripped. While the scenario of a stigma of physical touch is an extreme case, this shows how far human interaction can be removed as a society such as the one in The Machine Stops as communication becomes more revolved around technology and between two humans face to face.

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Reflection on The Machine Stops by E.M. Foster—— By Steve Sun

Reflection on The Machine Stops by E.M. Foster

The fiction describes a dystopian future of human race that the machines took the control over the world. The human in that fictional world lived underground separately in chambers where all their needs were fulfilled by the buttons on the walls. The people spent their whole life in the chambers and their thoughts were generated in it. As a result over many years the people below the surface began to change and worship the machine. The transportation to the surface of the earth and between humans were not banned but no one saw any need in doing such thing. The main character of the fiction are Vashti who was consent with her life in the chamber and her son Kuno who has always challenged the authority of the Machine. The story follows the two of them as they struggle to keep their relationship in this world.

I do agree with a lot of people who have read this fiction that the theme of this story lies in that a world which depend itself solely on the technology and “Machines” will definitely end up catastrophically for human, which in this case is that the machine stops working and collapsed, along with the humans in it. But I think that it’s not only the physical body of the human were destroyed, but also the thought of human were controlled. People living in the chambers simply believe that the environment on surface of the earth is too hostile to live and simply deny the fact that there were indeed people living on it. People who challenge the authority of the Machine will be seen as  ‘unmechanical’ and threatened with Homelessness. And what’s more tragic is that the fact that the human fears the Machine was initially created by human rather than by machine itself. It’s the human who created the machine, it’s also human who are satisfied with their lives imprisoned in the machine and the interaction cut by machine, and its also human who gradually depend their whole life on machine and see them as their god. While machines just followed the things that they are programmed to do, or to some extend, they did nothing, but by doing nothing they controlled human who were meant to control. How ironic.

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Week 1: Response to “The Machine Stops” by E.M.Forster- Milly (Yumin Cai)

“The Machine Stops” shows us a highly developed mechanical era where humans live in the small, underground rooms with all kinds of buttons and switches to meet their life demands. People use the visual “round plate” (1) to communicate with each other and get engaged in social activities. Illness would be cured by medical machines while long-distance trip would be easily managed by giant airships… Machines become the dominant role of humans’ life. Meanwhile, humans also get used to living with the machines, however, feel strange to directly interact with each other.

This is a contradictory and ironic civilization, human beings create the machines, however, worship these machines as if they were gods. Humans are gradually blinded to the real world, deprived their living ability and eventually become a foolish slave to the machine system. As a result, when the machines stop operating in the end, human society is stuck in disorder and panic.

Though this story is written down 100 years ago, the situation it described still shares a lot of similarities with our life nowadays: video chat, the automatical machine system, online communication taking place of face-to-face talk…Just like Kuno says “its hum penetrates our blood, and may even guide our thoughts” (13). It is also the time for us to think about the relationship between humanity and machine in our life: does our mind truly follow the technology? Should we set an ethical line for the development of the technology?