Images of a networked society: E.M. Forster's "The Machine Stops."

Cox did not develop any tension between these images. He assumed both would increasingly describe modern urban man. But in at least one sense, they may come to suggest opposite pulls. Cox claimed that "every tendency in modern society points to accelerated mobility" (43); we may instead find the switchboard becoming an increasingly literal image, with people, at least in their daily routines, becoming less mobile physically. The range of connections increases enormously, but physical mobility decreases as both work and entertainment operate through computer and television. Lewis Mumford discussed a similar vision in pre-computer terms: "Instead of his travelling, the world moves before the Megalopolitan, on paper; instead of his venturing forth on the highways of the world, adventure comes to him, on paper... " (227). Now, of course, we have the information superhighway.

A further question about Cox's description of the enormous freedom of urban man at the switchboard arises when the switchboard becomes increasingly literal: the extent to which the switchboard demands our attention, leaving us open to the pull of others. Forster's city differs radically in a physical sense from Evgeny Zamyatin's city in We (1922): there, individuals live in individual glass cubicles with glass walls, so that everyone can see his neighbors, while in "The Machine Stops" the walls are physically opaque. But the electronic lines of Forster's citizens are open, raising related questions about individuality and freedom. When Vashti goes to sleep, the messages keep coming, backing up on her answering machine; even in the moments she is private, the call of the group weighs on her, the pressure of the switchboard constrains her.

Forster's image of the cell of a beehive brings together the several aspects of the man-made, machine-sustained, networked society. He uses the image both literally and figuratively, beginning from his first sentence asking the reader to "imagine, if you can, a small room, hexagonal in shape, like the cell of a bee" (3). We can think of a hive of activity as suggesting order and energy. In ancient Greece, bees were seen as admirable symbols of work, obedience, "industry, 'creative activity and wealth" (Cirlot 22), and modern utopias have typically been based on the "beehive ideal" (Langer 110). But Susanne Langer goes on to emphasize the essential differences between human societies and hives, and as Lewis Thomas notes, we are generally not flattered today by comparisons between ourselves and swarming insects (6). Two essays written in the 1980s--the first by Thomas P. Dunn and Richard D. Erlich and a second by Arthur O. Lewis--trace the historical shift in use of this image from positive to negative connotations.

Forster draws on several familiar aspects of the hive image, the potentially positive as well as the negative, to critique the society in "The Machine Stops":

* Hives contain a great many creatures organized into an efficient, stable whole. The whole world here is a hive, made up of tier upon tier of cells--well organized indeed but nightmarish in its tessellated uniformity.