Social Responsibility In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

Today humans have the ability to create advanced technologies that promise to change our world for the better, or for the worse, depending on how man decides to place boundaries. Frankenstein by Mary Shelly continues to remain relevant today as an archetype for society exploring technology and its ramifications on social responsibility as well as morality vs progress. Society today tends to have myopic views of progress illustrated through the evolution of social media and artificial intelligence. Today Mary Shelley’s novel and characters have become an archetype for technology gone wrong. It remains relevant as an outcome scientist’s of all types fear and avoid. Bruce Mazlish of Stanford University and author of The Fourth Discontinuity states,

Social media has been extremely beneficial to our society by allowing us to communicate with people all over the world. Social media has forced transparency in many companies and governments worldwide. It has played a huge role in the Arab Spring allowing people to share their stories and educate the rest of the world of the crisis in the Arab world. In the past uprisings and revolutions could have easily been censored but today images and videos can be shared online and specifically on Facebook. It is clear that social media was extremely beneficial by helping the world become aware of the Arab crisis. On the contrary, many horrible things happened because of it such as a convenient platform to advance harmful ideologies such as ISIS. Immanuel Abiodun of the University of Winnipeg

He believes that government regulation is necessary until we are able to find solutions to ensure that the internet is actually doing more good than harm. With these statements, one may believe that the regulation of social media is the best way to save humanity from the monster but other scholars suggest differently. Social media is an interesting source of technology because it gives the users an opportunity to influence its use and purpose. This revelation leads some scholars and scientists to argue that it is society that is becoming Frankenstein’s monster which is why Shelly’s novel is so prevalent in our society. Raquel Bellefleur argues that social media is not Frankenstein’s monster rather it is society.
“What if social media, much like Frankenstein’s monster, is being misunderstood? What if its purpose and all of its possibilities are being horribly misconstrued?... This obsession [with social media] positions those who disconnect as more human and more alive than those who use mobile devices/social media, who are positioned as less-human-unthinking-robot-zombies” (Bellefleur, 2016).
Bellefleur’s notion that social media is not the monster and society makes it evident that Dr. Frankenstein and his monster are common themes in our society and something that is avoided even if there is still debate on the novels correct