In my house we have no gas, only electricity which runs off an electricity meter. Most of the time this doesn’t make any real difference to our lives, we just have to remember to check how much money we have left and keep ourselves in the black, but when our electricity suddenly turns off it is a very strange sensation.
E.M. Forster’s ‘The Machine Stops’ opens describing a machine that controls the world, that everyone within it is in awe of it and never think to question the power it holds over their existence. At the end of the short story the machine stops and no-one notices or can do anything to stop it as it is too late. This story seems to hold a strong resonance for the way that our lives has gradually but definitely become controlled by our reliance on electricity as a connection to the media. In the story when the machine finally stops the whole world has to grind to a halt because there is no way for people to communicate as they have all become so isolated and communicating only through the machine. Once the machine stops there is no way for the people to know what is happening and they have to try and survive using their own instincts and for a very short period of time they reconnect to each other and work together.
When the electricity in our house unexpectedly turns off we are all suddenly stopped doing whatever we are doing because with three girls in our house we use huge amounts of electricity. At any one time there is normally at least two different music systems playing, there is always at least one computer running and normally there is a television playing. On a typical evening we all retire to our individual rooms, all with our own heating and lighting and spend our evenings watching television/films and playing on our computers but once the electricity turns off we are forced to commune on the landing and argue about who is going to go and put money on the meter; the most important thing is regaining our connection to the outside world. It is amazing how much electricity we use once we are deprived of it and we normally go together as we simply do not have anything else to do, no television, no internet, no music and not even any lighting to read a book. Perhaps we should use this time to bond, to talk but we race to reconnect ourselves to the outside world.
The worst thing is when we wake up in the morning and it has gone off overnight as there is a sudden panic, a wave of fear wondering what we are missing from the outside world as we all tend to turn our televisions and internet on in the morning. In ‘The Machine Stops’ the moment that Vashti realises that the machine has lost it’s power is when she hears silence for the first time, she’d always been ‘surrounded by the steady hum’ and in our society it seems that we all live in a system with a constant background noise. There is always some music playing, always a television playing, always the internet on and the whirring of technology. The last time the electricity went off in the early hours of the morning I actually woke up straight away even though there is no alarm or anything but perhaps I simply subconsciously noticed no background noise of the technology that resides around my bed. Instantly I put on the emergency electricity and went happily back to sleep, safe in the knowledge that there would be some electricity for me to have a shower and check my emails before I went to work the next morning.
The whole world relies on a vast network of systems which are all run off electricity and through these networks we learn all that we need to know about the world and we gain nearly all our entertainment through the media and it often makes me wonder what would happen if the whole world suddenly run out of electricity and we had to make do without. I’m sure that we could manage without all this technology if necessary as our ancestors have but perhaps the question is not what we as human beings can withstand but what we would be willing to manage without. I’m sure that if had no electricity and no media then we would all revert to a primitive state, following whatever signs of life we can and fighting for the return of our way of life, a return to the machine that currently controls us.
I really liked E.M.Forsters short story and the fact that he envisaged a world in the future that would reflect and mirror his short tale, it is interesting to see how his story now appears very relevant unlike the times of when he was writing. It is quite a scary thought however when one stops and thinks about the world and how much we are forced to play the role of the puppet on a string under the mass control of new technologies which seem at present very domineering and dictatorial.