The Digitized Museum and the Troubling Reliance on Technology to Manage Knowledge in E. M. Forster’s The Machine Stops

Abstract

ABSTRACT:This paper explores the digitized museum in E. M. Forster’s science fiction novella The Machine Stops (1909). Forster replaces the physical space of museums with a digitized platform, complete with information censorship and broadcast through the technological home of humanity, the Machine. In examining Forster’s warning of tasking a machine to manage knowledge, this paper considers the real-life technological progress of digitizing archives and how this current practice is posited as a positive regardless of its causing digital amnesia. By analyzing how early science fiction exposes subjective biases in traditional museum practice, paired with the airbrushing of knowledge through digitized museum platforms, this paper posits that the museum in science fiction challenges views of how knowledge comes to be narrativized and disseminated, with a focus on the digitized museum as a failed memory institution plagued by subjectivity.