Nick Kaplan

Technophobia

In their essay entitled Technophobia, Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner argue that technophobia is used in films to reinforce conservative values by equating them to nature, which is established as embodying an inherent liberty. In such films technology is characterized in opposition to spontaneity, freedom and individual distinction. It essentially becomes an oppressive force against the natural world. The natural world, however, ultimately becomes the vehicle through which traditional social institutions are represented. This linking of conservative social ideals with the natural world thus presents them to the viewer as literal and fundamental truths that are inherently identified within natural law. Modernity, represented in the form of technology, is then placed in opposition to the natural world and thus is at odds with this conservative social authority.

According to Ryan and Kellner, it is also crucial to note how in technophobic films modernity comes to be embodied by a technological being that is presented as fundamentally evil and that the natural world is therefore, fundamentally good. This type of presentation of good verses evil demonizes all the characteristics such as mass democratic equality that are linked to the technologically modern world because they seem to come at the cost of individuality, personal freedom and expression. In such films the triumph of good over evil comes in the form of a flight from or the destruction of a world of technology in favor for the natural world in which such virtues are allowed to flourish. In such films, however, the triumph of the natural world is essentially the legitimization of the conservative social authority that manifests itself in such institutions as patriarchy, which perpetuates forms of social inequity. Thus, technophobic films instill in the viewer a scene that conservative social authority is right and naturally just but that it is being threatened by an increasingly modern world of technology�s social construction, which therefore must be fought against. There is, however, no consideration that these conservative institutions are themselves the result of social constructs.

Ryan and Kellner acknowledge that there are films that present the viewer with a similar dichotomy between humanity and technology that are able to underwrite the conservative technophobia by presenting the two more objectively. Such films also present an alternative to the natural world paradigm by suggesting that notions of romance and emotion are the products of technology and thereby provide a means of escape from a world dominated by the evil callousness of capitalism.

Does Ryan and KellnerÕs presentation of Technophobia as a genre meant to reinforce systems of conservative values seem valid? Why or why not?

Does a return to the natural world necessarily equate to a return to traditional conservative systems of social authority such as patriarchy? What are possible alternatives to this view of the symbolic role of nature?

Does a fear of the increased pervasiveness of technology necessarily stem from a fear of its destabilization of nature? Are there any other reasons that technological domination ought to be feared that donÕt reduce to it replacing nature such as a rise in individual isolation or an overwhelming adherence to rationalism that seems to follow from technology pervasion? Are these just forms of technology replacing nature?