Charles Dickens...Only Better

Janet Murray paints a vivid portrait of a sensation based storytelling medium in which human response is in relation to a simulation. She points out that technicians have programmed the correct pitch and frequency into the machine in order to produce an array of human emotions. It reminds me of binary code. It can be broken down into formulas where pitch plus frequency minus volume (0) is equal to the equivalent emotion where most humans produce tears in response to despair. (1)

The author presents this and makes the reader think about the possibilities. Could it be real time fantasy or is it debilitating like an addiction? There's also endless possibilities for education. I can think of at least 100 works of fiction that I suffered through, and imagine what sensation based storytelling could do to transform them.These possibilities might make it well worth wiring myself to the machine.

Since this medium is sensory based, the old classics of literature can breathe again. I can imagine the new option of picking which character's viewpoint you would like to see/hear/touch. Instead of the pure and predictable Pip, I could experience Great Expectations through Estella's senses. Miss Havesham's bittersweet maniacal ways would be a personal experience. This medium is probably what Huxley and Bradbury would consider most persuasive. It requires total immersion.

I was surprised to find Murray's book published in 1997. I would have guessed the publication date no earlier than the year 2000. This thought is directly followed by how much time everyone wasted on the Y2K scare. Glorianna Davenport and Brian Bradley published an article the same year, where they discuss the future of the cinema experience. They seemed to share Murray's vision of encompassing all of the senses.

Murray's description of of the "feely" theater experience contains the word horror. I can see why some people would feel threatened by this, even saddened. I can also think of another group of people who would accept this and not feel bothered by it. Sometimes the human response is engineered. It is done everyday by commercials, television, and movies. I don't think that human emotion is so complex that it could not be re produced by a command prompt or a machine. I think it could be hacked. People use emoticons in their letters as a simple way of attaching human emotion to their words. Although this is a fetal attempt at deciphering human emotion, it stems from the need to apply a formula to something overwhelming. We like to group things and reduce complex ideas to usable formats.