Working on rewriting my proposal, my favorite short story came to mind. My project is about critically analyzing our dependence on furniture, and hopefully acting on it. E.M. Forster in his 1909 story The Machine Stops depicts a world in which humanity is reduced to weak blobs entirely entertained and dependent on a god-like automatic infrastructure called The Machine. The main character, Kuno, realizes this dependency all around him and begins exercising, walking instead of taking the convenient trains and airships, climbing instead of taking elevators, etc. In the quote below, Kuno is talking to his mother. He asked her to come visit him, and her response was that she could see him just fine over the video phone. Kuno replies:
"You know that we have lost the sense of space. We say 'space is annihilated', but we have annihilated not space, but the sense thereof. We have lost a part of ourselves. I determined to recover it, and I began by walking up and down the platform of the railway outside my room. Up and down, until I was tired, and so did recapture the meaning of 'Near' and 'Far'. 'Near' is a place to which I can get quickly on my feet, not a place to which the train or the air-ship will take me quickly. 'Far' is a place to which I cannot get quickly on my feet . . .. Man is the measure. That was my first lesson. Man's feet are the measure for distance, his hands are the measure for ownership, his body is the measure for all that is lovable and desirable and strong. Then I went further: it was then that I called to you for the first time, and you would not come."
Such a story may seem far from our current world, but a lot has changed since 1909 when Forster wrote this, and much of that change has sent us reeling towards this fiction. Today when John tried to show me a video link and it wouldn't load, we stood there like a bunch of bafoons, staring, waiting, and hoping. He said "we're so dependent on this stuff," and then explained what the video was going to show.
Furniture is only a miniscule aspect of our growing dependence on the man-made, and it certainly isn't mentioned in Forster's story. Forster was concerned with transportation, complacency, and atrophy. Well I'm concerned with two of those, and how do we interact with a world where we have "lost the sense of space"? With our butts on the chairs on the trains, on the planes, in the cars, and at our desks.
Furniture is only a miniscule aspect of our growing dependence on the man-made, and it certainly isn't mentioned in Forster's story. Forster was concerned with transportation, complacency, and atrophy. Well I'm concerned with two of those, and how do we interact with a world where we have "lost the sense of space"? With our butts on the chairs on the trains, on the planes, in the cars, and at our desks.