|
LITR 4368 Literature of the Future 
|
Sample answers
for Part 2:
|
 |
Brandon Burrow
Whose Future is it Anyway?
Technology surrounds us. It
is difficult to find a room in the modern world that lacks a screen designed to
grab our attention in it, ready to swallow passerby in a portal to the version
of reality present in the programming on display. Electronic devices are so
convenient that we often do not consider how our screen time affects our brains;
the subliminal messaging and inception of ideas not our own is covered by the
hints of dopamine our brains feed us to reward us for “interacting” with the
world. The perception of time and events can be confused and drastically changed
by media, as evidenced in Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Garden of Forking Paths,”
where there exists an idea of a book which doubles as a labyrinth prompting the
question, “What does a book (which was once a technology itself enabled by the
printing press) that contains all pasts, presents, and futures look like?” My
answer is the internet/virtual reality, and in this research report I will
examine how technology and social media influence our perceptions of the world
in fiction and beyond, creating of its own volition or allowing users to create
for themselves their own pasts, presents, and futures and why we should be
cautious of the information we consume.
In Ready Player One, the
main character, Wade Watts, lives in a world that is identifiably
post-apocalyptic, as it is stricken by climate change and a lack of resources
that drives the masses into an alternate reality video game simulator known as
the O.A.S.I.S as a form of escapism. The plot of the novel centers on an Easter
egg hunt for clues to solve a puzzle left by Halliday, the reclusive inventor of
the O.A.S.I.S, after his death. Halliday was a lifelong gamer and thus, all the
necessary keys to winning the challenge can be found in the media that he
considered to be part of his own “canon” as the egg-hunter or “gunters” refer to
it. Kids like Wade, as well as adults and entire corporations, take part in the
hunt, as the winner is to be given control of the simulation’s future—which
influences untold millions of people—and riches beyond imagining.
This is an idea also seen
in Thomas Fox Averill’s “The Onion and I.” In Averill’s story, a virtual reality
is offered to citizens that is advertised as replacing true reality as the
narrator notes: “once the government, together with all the huge
telecommunications companies, realized they could make and enforce laws on the
computer, they also realized they could make and control people” (Onion 11). In
a 2018 article by David Robson for the BBC, he cites
“a recent study in Science journal”
that “confirmed that false news spreads much more rapidly than verified
information from respectable sources. ‘It’s very possible that most people are
not at risk of being stuck in an echo chamber, but they are still being targeted
with specific ads based on their behaviour, or they are still being targeted
with misinformation’” (Robson). The threat of alternate realities is no longer
native only to speculative fiction but exists wrapped within the information
sources we consult every day on the internet. An illusion of choice can be
carefully constructed by distant corporations unbeknownst to the end user who
may still believe themselves to be in an unbiased reality.
Inside
Ready Player One’s O.A.S.I.S, players
can choose an avatar of any race, gender, or species (if they prefer fantasy or
sci-fi characters from popular culture), that causes the “lines of distinction
between a person’s real identity and that of their avatar…to blur” just as the
narrator in “The Onion and I” thinks that “maybe, I wasn’t real at all but a
cyberperson” (RP1 60, Onion 20). Identity and reality itself is confused through
a layering of truth that obfuscates perception and the senses. The onion
metaphor that Averill’s story uses is an apt one as people must learn to
negotiate layers of reality within their many selves and ideas that may or not
be their own. For the narrator in the “The Onion and I,” even his own mother’s
emotions are hard to verify as he feels her “enthusiasm was so strong it might
have been programmed into the computer, or flashed as an image into the helmet I
wore to replace the sensory data of the ‘real’ world with the sensory data
projected by the computer” (Onion 19). If emotions and senses cannot be trusted,
what can be?
In a world like the one we
live in, with many hard to conceptualize events taking place across the globe,
forming informed and strong personal opinions can be difficult and people often
flock to established opinions and agendas. In a 2018 news article on “How Social
Media Echo Chambers Drown out the Voices in the Middle,” Tonya Mosley cites a
study by Laura Jakli that found “’when there is a hot-button issue in the news,
moderate positions seem to disappear’” (Mosley). While people might “naturally
have a pretty diverse opinion,” after monumental events their opinions tend to
“’merge or mold with the people [they] follow’” on social media (Mosley). In the
modern age people often have difficulty retaining their identity due to the
deluge of ideas and opinions that course around them, causing many people to
simply latch on to ideals that are popular, and possibly replicated through
rhetoric.
The identity that
Ready Player One’s Easter egg hunt
seeks to replicate according to Megan Amber Condis is that of a white male (16).
Condis notes that, while “at first glance, the founding of an alternative,
popular cultural canon seems like a great equalizer” since Halliday’s research
content is widely available for free or cheap, it quickly becomes apparent that
Halliday’s “pop culture ‘syllabus’ embedded within
Ready Player One imagines the gaming
subculture as almost exclusively white and male” (7, 9). Halliday’s canon is
based on the media that he enjoyed throughout his life, and is meant to
“essentially ask his fans to re-live his youth via his favorite fiction, movies,
television shows, comics, and video games in the hopes that these experiences
will shape their perspectives on gamer culture into something that more or less
resembles his own” (6). One of the challenges that Halliday tasks gunters with
is to play the role of a character in an interactive film called a “flicksync”
(RP1 108-12). The player must get every line of dialogue correct, with bonus
points for using accurate inflection and veracious taking on of the role, to
progress in the hunt. The role chosen for the player is David Lightman (Matthew
Broderick’s character in the film
WarGames) (108). Condis notes that “a successful playthrough…requires more
than mere knowledge of plot or even the scripted lines. [It] directly reward[s]
identification with the young,
straight, white male [protagonist]” of the film (12). Essentially, what on the
surface seems like a heroic fight to keep an online virtual reality technology
free for people of all nationalities and creeds requires the talents of only one
identity that is shaped through Halliday’s challenges.
The idea of reality being
shaped by the vision of a specific group is also explored in William Gibson’s
“The Gernsback Continuum.” The narrator begins seeing “semiotic ghosts.
Fragments of the mass dream” of a subset of Americans raised on pop culture
(37). Architectural styles and inventions from sci-fi movies and impractical
airplanes that the narrator recognizes as incapable of flight pass by in front
of him as he questions whether his reality is his own. Travelling late at night
he sees a vision of “a dream Tucson thrown up out of the collective yearning of
an era,” populated by “children of Dialta Downes's `80- that-wasn't; they were
Heirs to the Dream (49-50). The future he sees is homogenous, representative of
a “white, blond” and likely blue-eyed peoples’ reality, and it is disorienting
to him (50). The story depicts competing versions of reality based on what
people want it to be, just as Mosley finds when interviewing a social media user
who says that “on social media, [she] found a tribe” that she now identifies
with (Mosley). When the narrator in Gibson’s story calls his friend to relay his
experience, the prescription his friend offers is just to go watch more TV, or
in other words, to replace one fiction with another (57). Like the characters in
“The Onion and I,” Gibson’s narrator is subjected “to live in both worlds: to
dream and to wake, to learn and to imagine, to live between two lives” (Onion
21). The narrator perceives different visions of what the world
is based on what ideology is winning out in the mass conscious, and thus
what reality influences his own sight.
Visions of a homogenous future is an ideal confronted
in Ursula K. Leguin’s short story “Newton’s Sleep.” In the story it is
established that the population is largely white, high-IQ academic individuals
with little variation. The rational to a fault patriarchal character, Ike,
wishes to relinquish ties to mother earth. He considers the monitors that the
Spes station keeps in contact with earth through an “umbilicus” that should be
cut so that the Spes people can “start fresh” (Newton’s 315). Ike is denouncing
a balanced feed of information in lieu of a controlled message. During the
course of the story illusions of the world the Spes people left behind such as
images of beautiful people from primitive cultures, landscapes, and animals are
seen in the hallways of the space station. Le Guin uses the term “‘shared
experience’” to describe the sights the Spes people are seeing, indicating that
the homeland cannot be entirely erased and that it is collective perception that
brings these images to life, into being. Ike, however, has chosen to affect a
viewpoint that is so entirely unidirectional and pointed to a “desired end” that
he is unable to see what everyone else sees (Newton’s Sleep 338).
This tunnel-visioned viewpoint is also possible in the “virtual Wild West”
of social media that “might allow us to overcome some of the social and
geographical barriers between people, so that we establish a more balanced view
of the world around us. But it [is] equally possible that we would simply erect
new fences [as Ike tries], as like-minded people siphon themselves into
homogenous groups who all share the same viewpoints and gather their information
from the same sources” (Robson).
The fickle nature of
reality is thoroughly present in Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Garden of Forking
Paths,” wherein the narrator is searching for a book written by his ancestor
that deals with the “abysmal problem of time,” namely that for every moment and
choice, an endlessly branching future and past exist where each choice was
chosen (49, 53). It is revealed that the book itself is a labyrinth, a common
model for how alternative futures can work. Its forking paths symbolize “an
infinite series of times, in a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent
and parallel” as it seeks to embrace “all
possibilities of time” (53). Reality then becomes subjective, the choice an
actor makes at an exact moment colors his perceptions of reality. The narrator
discovers this himself: “Then I reflected that everything happens to a man
precisely, precisely now. Centuries of centuries and only in the present do
things happen; countless men in the air, on the face of the earth and the sea,
and all that really is happening is happening to me” (6). Those last words, “all
the really is happening is happening to me” can be chilling in the context of
the digital age where people can choose their information stream.
The modern user of
technology, given the almighty power to shape their own information diet and
thus their own reality, can convince themselves that they live in a branch of
reality unique to them, where only what they perceive matters. And while there
“appears to be no easy solution to this online disharmony” as Robson notes,
“experts such as Dubois hope that media literacy education at schools and
university may help, teaching basic critical thinking skills and the ways to
identify bias in an argument, allowing us to appraise news sources more
thoughtfully” (Robson). One way that
we can resist the influence of our high-tech present is in the study of
speculative fiction that depicts the folly of being controlled by a rigid
discourse. Classes like Literature of the Future and education in critical
thinking and analysis are then the solution to understanding the rhetoric of the
messages around us.
Works Cited
Cline, Ernest.
Ready Player One.
Condis, Megan Amber.
“Playing the Game of Literature: Ready Player One, the Ludic Novel, and the
Geeky “Canon” of White Masculinity.”
Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 39, no. 2, Winter 2016, pp. 1-19,
10.2979/jmodelite.39.2.01.
Mosley, Tonya. “How Social Media Echo Chambers Drown
Out the Voices in the Middle.” KQED,
5 Nov. 2018,
https://www.kqed.org/news/11703717/how-social-media-echo-chambers-drown-out-the-voices-in-the-middle.
Robson, David. “The Myth of the Online Echo Chamber.”
BBC, 17 Apr. 2018,
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20180416-the-myth-of-the-online-echo-chamber.
