The rise of film and television in the first half of the twentieth century led several of the era’s major writers to fear for the future of the book. They responded, in their fiction, by presenting a vision of the future in which universal dependence on technology—epitomized in the domination of screens over books—dissolves traditional bonds of charity, and unravels the fabric of civilized society. In retrospect, we can only call them prescient.
Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World—published in 1932, just after the transition from silent film to “talkies”—depicts futuristic cinema experiences called “feelies,” in which metal knobs on moviegoers’ armrests transmit realistic sensations of whatever the on-screen actors are feeling. Some of these are as innocent as the feeling of hairs on a bearskin rug, but most are violent or pornographic.
