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Selected Papers of Internet Research 16:
The 16th Annual Meeting of the
Association of Internet Researchers
Phoenix, AZ, USA / 21-24 October 2014
Suggested Citation (APA): Rettberg, J. (2015, October 21-24). Corpses, Fetuses and Zombies: The
Dehumanization of Media Users in Science Fiction and Mainstream Media. Paper presented at Internet
Research 16: The 16th Annual Meeting of the Association of Internet Researchers. Phoenix, AZ, USA:
AoIR. Retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org.
CORPSES, FETUSES AND ZOMBIES: THE DEHUMANIZATION OF
MEDIA USERS IN SCIENCE FICTION AND MAINSTREAM MEDIA
Jill Walker Rettberg
University of Bergen
The relationship between humans and media is a central trope of classic science fiction,
and one where media is frequently portrayed as a threat. Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit
451 (1953) is focalised through Mildred’s husband, who sees her as distant from him,
imprisoned by the media she loves and surrounded by her soap opera heroes: “His wife
stretched on the bed, uncovered and cold, like a body displayed on the lid of a tomb,
her eyes fixed to the ceiling by invisible threads of steel, immovable. And in her ears the
little Seashells, the thimble radios tamped tight, and an electronic ocean of sound, of
music and talk and music and talk coming in, coming in on the shore of her unsleeping
mind.” Bradbury’s media prison is imagined from the world of television and radio, but
the anxieties expressed are the same as those we see today, for instance in the short
film I Forgot My iPhone (2013), where the protagonist goes through her day as the only
person not constantly interacting with their phone. The two minute short has nearly 50
million views on YouTube, showing that the motif hits a nerve. I Forgot ends with an
image very reminiscent of Bradbury: as the protagonist curls up in bed with her
boyfriend and turns out the light, he lifts up his phone and stares transfixed at its screen,
his face bathed in its light. These two portrayals of humans and technology, created
sixty years apart, use the same imagery: media creates distance between lovers.
This paper aims to connect the motif of the human imprisoned and isolated by media as
it is expressed in dystopic science fiction to its expressions in mainstream discourse. As
a scholar of digital aesthetics and narratives rather than a social scientist, my aim is not
to survey a representative selection of science fiction or to provide statistically reliable
data, but to explore ways in which we make meaning by analysing passages and
scenes that yield productive images about the relationship between humans and media,
from science fiction literature, games and movies as well as from contemporary media
discourse.
Immersion
Mildred is experiencing an immersive form of virtual reality. She has screens on all her
walls and the characters in her favourite soap operas include her in the plots, waiting for
her to say her lines. The Holodeck in Star Trek and the FlickSyncs in Ernest Cline’s
Ready Player One (2011) follow the same idea, and many of today’s richly graphical
games have a similar ambition. In the 1990s and early 2000s, immersion was a key
concept for scholars of electronic literature and video games, and was viewed as highly
desirable (Murray 1997, Ryan 2001, Walker 2003). Early cyberpunk fiction expresses
some of the same excitement, notably with William Gibson’s coining of the term
cyberspace as a “consensual hallucination” in Neuromancer (1984). In the early 90s,
video game arcades and fairgrounds allowed visitors to try out simple VR helmets and
gloves, and although the internet had almost no images, virtual, textual worlds like
MUDs and MOOs were what interested scholars the most. Online and offline seemed
like separate worlds, and as Sherry Turkle described in Life on the Screen (1995),
people often acted out different roles in different “worlds”. Today MMOGs like World of
Warcraft are important alternate worlds for millions of people, but in mainstream
discourse, and in some scholarship such as Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together (2011),
immersive media have become a threat.
Un-human, post-human, or a corpse?
Nathan Jurgensen, who coined the term “digital dualism” to describe the false but
common separation of “real life” and the digital (2012), wrote that I Forgot My iPhone
“isn’t about the problems of digital connection, it’s about propping oneself up as more
human and alive” (2013). He was referring to the reception of the film, but the contrast is
evident in the film itself as well. The protagonist is shown appreciating the beauty of
nature, in stark contrast to her phone-loving friends. Birds sing joyfully as she wakes,
and she listens, smiling, until her lover reaches for his phone. She goes for a morning
run and rests to watch the sunrise, as a man talks into his phone, ignoring the view. She
is shown to us as beautiful, alive and healthy, in contrast to the others who are locked to
their phones.
In Fahrenheit 451, Mildred’s husband imagines her as a corpse, with “invisible threads
of steel” fixing her eyes to her media. The image of a skull invaded by metal is
physically jarring, and reminiscent of the images of wires jacked into skulls in The Matrix
(1999). The metal in flesh is a graphical expression of the loss of our humanity, or, read
in a more positive light, as we likely should in The Matrix, it is an expression of the post-
human, where we become more than human.
It is harder to find a positive interpretation of the comparison of the media-loving human
to a corpse, and yet this is also a common trope in science fiction. Media in science
fiction doesn’t always lead to our apparent death, but it does often cause us to be in a
state other than fully alive as independent animals. In The Matrix most humans are kept
naked in glass vats, floating in something akin to umbilical fluid. These humans are
portrayed not as corpses but as unborn fetuses. The un-human in these stories is linked
to the time after death or before birth. We still have bodies, but exist in a form of limbo,
with no free will or agency. In the full paper, I will also examine the motionlessness of
humans trapped by media, as in the children’s movie Wall-E (2008), and the ways in
which the dehumanizing powers of the media are imagined as robbing humans of their
free will, as in the simulations that control people in Divergent (2013).
There are of course also many examples of positive portrayals of the relationship
between humans and media in science fiction. Daniel Suarez’s two novels Daemon
(2009) and Freedom (2010) show how easily the balance can shift from dystopia to
utopia. In Daemon software and augmented reality media appear to control humans
completely and in a very frightening manner, but in the sequel Freedom we see how
that same software and media tools allow humans to create a better society. But even
science fiction that shows the human user in control of media tends to touch upon the
same tropes of media as dehumanizing. In Ready Player One almost all the plot occurs
within the OASIS, a virtual world, but descriptions of the protagonist hooked up to his
virtual reality rig use imagery that contrast him to a healthy, adult human, for instance by
emphasizing his removal of all body hair, even his eyebrows, to improve the
connections between his haptic body suit and his skin.
By providing a better understanding of the cultural imaginaries of humans and our
relationship to technology, this paper will be useful to other scholars who wish to
understand the actual ways in which humans think about our media.
References
Jurgensen, Nathan. 2012. “The IRL Fetish.” The New Inquiry.
http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/the-irl-fetish/.
Jurgensen, Nathan (26.08.2013): “The Problem with the ‘I Forgot My Phone’ Video.”
Cyborgology. http://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2013/08/26/the-problem-with-the-
i-forgot-my-phone-video/
Murray, Janet H (1997): Hamlet on the Holodeck. The Future of Narrative in
Cyberspace. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Ryan, Marie-Laure (2001): Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in
Literature and Electronic Media. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP.
Turkle, Sherry (1995): Life On The Screen: Identity In The Age Of The Internet. New
York: Simon & Schuster.
Turkle, Sherry (2011): Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology And
Less From Each Other. New York: Basic Books.
Walker, Jill (2003): Fiction and Interaction: How Clicking a Mouse Can Make You Part of
a Fictional World. University of Bergen. https://bora.uib.no/handle/1956/1040
