'Dialing Our Death: A Critical Response to Stephen King’s Cell\r'

'While Stephen queen’s cadre might be about zombies, the 2006 novel is in any case a clever commentary on the States’s reliance on technology. poof’s setup is that, on the afternoon of October 1, a contradictory â€Å"pulse” is broadcast across Ameri posterior booth phone networks. The pulse, when heard by mint on their cells, immediately renders cell-phone users into murderous, zombie- akin creatures. These people, kn take in as â€Å"Phoners,” be no longer human. The few people unaffected by the pulse, called â€Å"Normies,” attempt to fight back for survival. queen regnant hints heavily that our dependency upon technology lead be our undoing. The central characters’ cope to survive runs secondary to King’s technophobic message. The plot is effectively more most-valuable than the floor it supports. Most of the attention is paid to the pulse itself. The rampaging zombies atomic number 18 given a reason to exist: t heir brains adjudge been literally â€Å"scrambled like a skillet of eggs” (43). Their violent and gory actions ar typic of what King feels our world is becoming.Even if King’s doesn’t think using cell phones and visiting websites will lead to apocalypse or rampages, perhaps he is (at the very least) suggesting that we argon becoming just as mindless. When the pulse strikes, the â€Å"Phoners” were connected via network. Everyone affected has been linked together. The danger, King suggests, is that our shrinking world is non necessarily a good thing. To King, cell phones and the Internet have ceased to be modes of transmitting information. Sharing information is less important than swapping videos and songs with friends now, or having conversations while walking through a park.People look like they argon talking to themselves. King feels that technology has left us vulnerable. We might not be vulnerable to a zombie-creating â€Å"pulse,” but w e are certainly vulnerable to losing our sense of identity and humanity. We are giving ourselves, little by little, over to technology. In Cell, the mindless â€Å"Phoners” are soon organized into â€Å"Flocks,” which locomote around in patterns very much like migrating birds. This underscores King’s central fear: the man and wife of technology and biology. He seems to be calling for a world that exists offline.In his book The Soft Edge, media philosopher Paul Levinson agrees that the important nature of technology closely recalls mankind. There are legitimate concerns to consider as we move toward an ever-increasing habituation upon the technologies available to us. Levinson states that â€Å"the wisdom of nature is not unceasingly good for us, insofar as it accommodates hurricanes, drought, famine, earthquake, and all elbow room of destructive occurrences” (150). Nature’s tendency toward close and collapse, also known as entropy, is mirror ed in technology and, very clearly, in Cell.Like nature itself, death is part of the nature of technology, King believes. Levinson questions whether technology can have things similar to â€Å"ugly ragweed,” which must be monitored and controlled. He asks â€Å"whether ragweed can be controlled without suppressing the smasher and value that emerges right next to it, untended” (Levinson 151). His survey is aligned with King’sâ€technology has the aptitude to destroyâ€but he feels that it can be controlled. Technological systems will not revolt against us, as they do in Cell, but they must be actively watched.Cell paints a stark portrait of order of magnitude on the brink of collapseâ€one that people have willingly bought into. In King’s mind, we are ushering ourselves to our own demise, if not our loss of humanity. Something as simple and ubiquitous as a cell phone is turned into a tool of terror. With Cell, King makes us question whether we h ave established systems for ourselves that are not so much helpful as they are corruptive. His novel is a cautionary humbug about where we are heading as a civilization. When we next answer the phone, King suggests the fate of our own humanity may be calling.\r\n'