The Role Of Technology In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

What constitutes someone or something as monstrous? As humans, we tend to associate the word monster with an image of a hideous creature, generally found in horror movies and literature, that invokes fear or a feeling of threat by its actions. Therefore based on this stereotype, how does one take something that’s not a living creature, such as technology, and deem it monstrous? In prolific Romantic writer Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Shelley creates a plot that makes the novel’s creature appear monstrous, but what many readers fail to recognize is the underlying message that the technology which developed Frankenstein’s creation is the real “monster.” Nearly 200 years later, the same issue can be identified in society, only through a

By creating Victor Frankenstein, an emerging scientist with a deep passion for science, Shelley is establishing the symbol for the average person in society. Victor’s love for science and growing knowledge lead him to his obsession of creating a new being, an idea quickly turned into action. However, due to his initial ignorance to the impact of creating an entirely new race, his obsession and pride for his innovation almost immediately turn into regret and remorse as he steps back to actually process the potential of what this creature could do and what its naivety to the world could cause. Shelley uses Victor as the medium for symbolizing man, as we as humans tend to make emotional rather than logical decisions and act spontaneously, especially in the case of technology, according to Shelley. Nowadays, with technology’s overpowering presence in everyday life, and the rapid emergence of social media services like Twitter and Instagram, it is easy to see technology’s power, as Shelley feared, exhibited in current society. Just as Victor Frankenstein is representative of man, his creation is man’s creation, social media. Whether we’d like to admit it or not, technology excites us, many times to the point of which its brilliance blinds us to its

In a study conducted by Turkey’s Dokuz Eylul University, 220 students between the ages of 18 and 20 completed a survey that consisted of 14 questions covering demographic information, details of social networking sites, and habits of both genders, to determine the effects of social media and other similar technology on studying habits of students, specifically those in college. The results show that over half of each gender surveyed (70.3% of males and 54.2% of females) claimed they spend somewhere between two and three hours every day on a computer. Of those surveyed, over 86% of females and over 87% of males were said to have used those two to three hours of computer time on social media sites, and about 28% of them said that they also use portions of that time for studying purposes. A computer, however, obviously isn 't the only avenue to social networks. Over 65% of both genders admitted to spending one to three hours just on their cell phone everyday, with