通向未来的媒介——赫·乔·威尔斯《当沉睡者醒来》中的泛媒介化趋势与社会主义愿景

in Darwinian nature. He concludes that “moral theory should be deduced from an ideal social state” where humanity is built via rational planning and organizing towards a cooperative “World State” (227). During his visit to Russia in 1920, Wells described himself as a collectivist in his speech (Smith 271). This integration of personal activities into the broader discussion of society’s collective obligation runs throughout his career. He treats his activities in science in relation to sociological evolution, especially the moral issues occurred at the social level. Such moral principles direct Wells’s writings. In When the Sleeper Wakes, Wells speculates that the prestigious Sleeper should have the awareness to give up his individual interests and join the masses to undertake the collective mission. Before his transformation, the Sleeper is as ordinary as any individualist who enjoys sensory and emotional pleasures when intoxicating in Helen’s beauty and indulging in his privileges as the nominal king. But what these enticements bring him is only momentary contentment. Before accepting collectivism, although Graham has a feeling that he is trapped in a dreadful moving picture that is approaching and feels that “a great desire to see, a great longing to know, arose in him” (124), he is unable to find out the fact behind this horrible situation. In his short journey in the strange world, Graham has experienced sharp transformations in his psychological condition from perplexity to self-deception, and eventually to an utterly awakening of his collective consciousness. 

Conclusion

When the Sleeper Wakes is vital to comprehend Wells’s method of predicting the future and how media technology would change people’s lifestyle and perception of the world in an urbanized future, where public and private areas are saturated with highly advanced systems of monitoring and marketing. By analyzing the principal media in When the Sleeper Wakes and examining the human medialities of the protagonist, this thesis has demonstrated how media can shape Man’s awareness of his identity and how humans are treated like media in Wells’s vision of the future. It is more appropriate now to address the questions proposed at the start of this thesis about Wells’s anticipation of future society and the human race, and the answer lies in his treatment of Graham and so many other characters as spokesmen of a better world, or as a collective will, instead of individual beings. Behind it is Wells’s anticipation of a socialist society where individuals are small homogeneous components subjected to the welfare of larger groups, who are willing to relinquish their benefits and even lives in the middle of crisis for the survival and prosperity of their nations. 

Principal media divided into two categories are explored in chapter one to help readers better understand the concept and range of media. The media theory of Marshall McLuhan, for whom media encompass almost everything from languages we speak to houses we live in, is borrowed to reinforce the feasibility of the scope of media. In this chapter, both new technology inventions and traditional media, buildings, and roads specifically, are illustrated to reveal Wells’s attitude towards media and their impact on human society. Wells forecasts the subversive effects of visual and auditory technology, communication media, airplanes, and monitoring system on people’s consuming habits, news transmission, governmental propaganda, and even future political and social relations. His visualization of the technologized traditional media and their intensified functions is a remarkably effective way of scrutinizing the transformations and consequences brought about by new media technologies on an evolutionary scale. 

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