Forster’s 1909 story presciently predicted that mediated communication loses embodied presence

Evidence

Such tasks are easy for humans because we swim in perceptual and conceptual complexity from a young age. We grow up immersed in the ‘imponderable bloom’ of life and relationships — a phrase borrowed from E. M. Forster’s prescient 1909 science-fiction story, ‘The Machine Stops’. It tells of a future humanity living in isolated pods beneath the Earth’s surface. They rarely meet in the flesh, but communicate through a remote vision-phone system. A woman in her pod in Australia can talk to her son in Europe: they see each other’s images on special plates which they hold in their hands. But the son complains, ‘I see something like you in this plate, but I do not see you. I hear something like you through this telephone, but I do not hear you.’ The simulacrum is no substitute for the real Other. As Forster glosses it, ‘The imponderable bloom, declared by discredited philosophy to be the actual essence of intercourse, was ignored by the machine.’ — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 1024

Categorization

• STORYSTEM: Forster’s pod-dwelling humanity communicating through plates is a ready-made dystopian worldbuilding scaffold — a near-future or far-future society where every relationship is mediated could be seeded straight from this.
• CANDY: Forster’s 1909 sci-fi story has pod-dwellers video-calling across continents and yearning for in-person contact — a striking century-old anticipation of FaceTime loneliness.
• XREF: connects to: Forster’s Machine Stops anticipated Heidegger’s critique of technology in 1909 — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 1950; Losing bodily presence erodes the empathy that makes sense possible — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the…, 112

Broader Connections

• Forster’s Machine Stops anticipated Heidegger’s critique of technology in 1909 #corroborates (0.90) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 1950
• Losing bodily presence erodes the empathy that makes sense possible #expands (0.85) — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 112