Technophobia or Techno-Awesome?! (Q’s for Feb. 21)
While I understand that the two fictional texts that I have assigned for reading can be classified in a number of ways, not necessarily Science Fiction (Feed as sci-fi or cyberpunk; Little Brother as dystopian or just disturbing realism), I would like you to consider Applebaum’s introduction as a guide that can apply to other texts outside of the sci-fi realm.
Perceptions of technology as a corrupting force, particularly in relation to young people’s use of it, are related to the prevailing myth of the innocent child, as explored by Jacqueline Rose (1984), Anne Higonnet (1998), Jack Zipes (2000) and Henry Giroux (2000), to name but a few, and result in fiction written for a young audience which endorses a technophobic agenda. (Applebaum 1)
Please read the two excerpts (from Doctorow and Anderson) and see how they relate to the introduction from Applebaum, using the following questions and the above quotation to guide you:
- Do these excerpts show instances of this “technophobic agenda”?
- In what ways to the two texts seem to address technology either positively or negatively?
- In your experience, are young people interacting with technology in such a way that necessitates fictional representations of teens being “freed” from said technology?
- Or do you see technology instead as “freeing,” in that it can be used to overcome forces of oppression?
I found the two excerpts really interesting and I liked very much (actually I have downloaded Little Brother in my reader). But I think that both of them show different approach to the technology issue:
Feed by Anderson shows a technophobic agenda because of the dystopian world that the characters live in:
“But the braggest thing about the feed, the thing that made it really big, is that it knows everything you want and hope for, sometimes before you even know what things are. […] evil corporations, oh they’re so bad, we all say that, and we know they control everything. […] they keep like everyone in the world employed, so it’s not like we could do without them” [48 – 49]
The world that is expressed doesn’t have a lot of freedom: if you have to work for the same company, you probably can’t disagree with the politics because you can’t get out of the world they managed, and, also, they managed the media and entertainment that exist in the “feed” so this evil corporations had the control of almost everything. In this sense a world without technology would imply a world without control or surveillance, so would be an ideal world. It’s interesting what these point out: the author is telling us to live without technology is the better way of living, so live without surveillance it’s a better way of living too. But these have a miss point: if you live in society, you would always have surveillance, it’s naive to think anything else.
But, on the other Little Brother side is showing technology as a way to escape from surveillance of school: w1n5t0n knows how to managed to avoid security systems to get whatever he wants without being trapped. So here technology is being seeing in a “positive” way, in the sense that it’s allow you to do whatever you want, if you have the control of technology you can control the world. At one time in history the power was measured by force, after was by the money, now is the time of technology.
magdalena
16 Feb 11 at 12:44 pm
I think that the two texts are distinctly different. I agree with Magdalena that Feed is clearly techno-phobic. I’m not sure that Little Brother is a way to avoid technology; it seems to me to be a more balanced view of technology. w1n5t0n uses technology, but technology is also used against him, and against the American population. Doctorow walks a tightrope between positive and negative representations of technology (both w1n5t0n and his friends use it, but so do the authorities), but it would seem (and having not finished the book, I can only guess) since it is a YA novel, and thus follows Engdahl’s belief that the genre should “lead… young people to view the future not with our own era’s gloom and despair, but with the broader realism of renewed hope” (8). It would seem that Doctorow gives a more balanced approach to using literature as “a vehicle for exploring contemporary dilemmas within the context of scientific and technological discoveries” (3). This doesn’t discount Feed as an excellent text, but it is more definitively technophobic. I know when I read the book I worried about it coming true in the future.
As far as teens interacting with technology and needing to be set free, my experience is fairly limited. That being said, from what we’ve read, it’s not a bad idea. I think that this trope in literature is just a sign of the times; books have always been pushing the limits, taking children out of the comfortable and the normal. Technology is a natural next step in this “freeing”, akin to taking city kids out to the country to stay with their reclusive farmer uncle. Take the kids away from their ipods and cell phones, and teach them another way to live. I think that the freeing of children from technology is also a subversion of authority (damn the man!), a trope that is common in children’s literature. So to repeat myself, I think that it’s again a natural progression of literature to head down this way.
skmatson
17 Feb 11 at 6:05 pm
I think this idea of being ‘freed’ from technology as you present it, Stacey, is really interesting. I actually hadn’t thought about technology in these texts as the sort of norm from which to escape. Obviously the technology-centred worlds of both texts are dystopian in some respects, yet I don’t think of our current world as so technologically centred that we have to escape.
The more I think about it, though, the more I realize that our world is more controlled by tech than it first seems (I saw a girl who was no more than 8 years old on the Skytrain this morning and she had a Blackberry). It was only yesterday I was thinking, as I watched TV downloaded from the internet onto my laptop, how much more dependent I am on technology than the people in the show I was watching.
All of this is to say that in the same way that Wordsworth wrote about the need to escape industrialization, literature now must address the need to beware of the effects of technology. I think Little Brother is interesting in the way it examines the power dynamics of technology, but I think ultimately it speaks to the fact that the war of security and control in technology is never-ending.
jillian
19 Feb 11 at 3:15 pm
Thanks, Rob, for bringing up this fascinating topic. I realize now that although SF is my favourite genre, I’ve never read and Young SF, with the tangential exception of L’Engle’s _A Wrinkle in Time_. I literally had no idea about this ideological gulf between Adult SF and Young SF, as I’ve been reading “grown-up” science fiction since I was 12, and only came upon books like Doctorow’s YA stuff much more recently.
It seems to me that all fiction written for young people by adults is polemical to some extent, so Doctorow being somewhat explicit about this doesn’t really bother me. (That I agree with him for the most part doesn’t hurt either.) In fact, I’m more concerned when authors don’t lay their biases out there for everyone to see, as this underlying anti-technological tendency seems to do.
Doctorow, coming from an adult fiction background, obviously avoids this one-sided approach to technology, and provides a very nuanced and sophisticated view of technology, highlighting its power for good and ill alike. He doesn’t talk down to his audience, but treats them as though they are used to living with technology every day, as they undoubtedly are.
Doctorow is a realist, though, and his protagonists don’t come through unscathed. There are real repercussions for taking on the DHS, and technology can’t always save you. This grey area between dystopian and utopian futures is what makes contemporary SF so fascinating, so I was really disappointed to hear that most recent Young SF doesn’t explore this area.
I liked this quote from Sullivan that Applebaum mentions, that the future “is as new or unknown to the
adults as it is to the children, it is the adults who tell the children what it is likely to be.” This may be the case, but I think that in this era of a “reverse generation gap”, children may in fact have a better understanding of what the future may be than most adults do.
kifty
20 Feb 11 at 12:28 pm
First of all, I just wanted to thank Rob for the interesting readings and topic. I really enjoyed the excerpts from Feed and particularly Little Brother. As a long-time fan of science fiction, I was somewhat surprised by the Applebaum’s argument that technology is by and large represented as a negative force in Young SF. I pretty much grew up reading science fiction and if “authors writing for young people … act as socialization agents in the service of the current adult-child power hierarchy” with the intention of making a technophobe out of me, they failed spectacularly. That said, in retrospect, many of the themes I encountered could be construed as subtly (or not so subtly) anti-technology (ie. Ewoks vs. Evil Empire). Furthermore, I’m not sure that the books I was reading as a tween/teen would all count as “Young SF” in Applebaum’s definition as it seems that he is citing a very controlled sample of youth literature, and as he quite rightly stated, it is unlikely that youth can realistically be expected to read only books targeted at them (as opposed to adults). This also seems to thwart any ‘reinforcing of and adult anti-technology’ agenda, as kids could well be expected to just move straight past the “Youth SF” and onto the ‘good stuff.’ It would have been interesting to see this study completed with a survey of SF books that children and young adults were actually reading rather than just those targeted at them by adults.
I agree with the others in that Feed seems to support his theory with its hollow, bored-feeling description of the kids’ lunar trip and frightening ‘hacking’ experience. I was much more intrigued by Doctorow’s ‘Little Brother,’ which seemed to present technology as more of a Tool that was put to use by authorities against the youths, but could be subverted into serving them as well as long as they had the skills to manipulate it more effectively. That said, I only completed the first two chapters and would be interested to find out whether the kids’ comfort level with manipulating technology proves useful in the impending post-apocalyptic(?) Bay Area, or whether they find themselves cut off from the networks and power grids that they are at home in without the skills to survive in an ‘unplugged’ environment. Maybe I should add this one to my reading list too.
schuyler
21 Feb 11 at 10:10 am
I don’t think this could really be categorized as “Youth SF,” but our discussion about ‘Feed’ reminded me of Accelerando by Charles Stross which maybe takes the whole ‘feed’ idea a little bit further (post-singularity style). If you’re into this kind of modern science fiction, I’d say it’s worth a read.
schuyler
21 Feb 11 at 7:48 pm