The literature industry is one of the biggest and most profitable ones. Aside from the fact that a lot of people are raking in stashes of cash working in this industry, there exists this idea that suggests that novels exist as a symbolic representation of man’s ideas, wants, vision, and even fears. In this paper, the author presents an argument about how a particular work of literature, that is the Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton, presents as a reflection of contemporary society, its hopes, fears, realizations, or anything that might represent humans’ existence.
In an academic journal published in the Journal of Death Studies in 2011, the authors examined the correlation between man’s understandings of death attitudes as presented in multimedia works, how it is presented using positive psychology within the context of meaning management .
Although the study focused on proving that the concept of death as the central theme being portrayed in many multimedia works (books and novels included) and that it has a significant impact on how people view the idea, the broader message of the study (outside the concept of death and how it is affected by its being portrayed) suggests that the media can be used as a tool to manage the mood of people and structure their understanding, in a concept that is known as social engineering. In that study, for example, the authors argued that they can be used “to portray death acceptance in an instructive way” . If multimedia works can successfully do this with the concept of death then they should also be able to do the same for other concepts.
In another study published in the Journal of Adolescence in 2004, the researchers argued that one of the results of exposure to a concept or idea through various multimedia forms such as video games, television, movies, and the internet, is desensitization, or the mindset that the concept being pushed forward is a normal occurrence. .
Desensitization refers to a process wherein an individual experiences diminished emotional or stimulation-related responsiveness to certain often negative or aversive stimuli after being exposed to it, especially in a repeated manner. This, Funk, Baldacci, and Pasold (23) argues is what happens whenever an individual gets exposed to certain ideas through the various forms of multimedia.
And lastly, in another previously-published study in the American Journal of Sociology, the researchers argued that there exists a unique relationship between literature and society. Albrecht (425) noted that “literature is interpreted as reflecting norms and values, as revealing ethos of culture, the processes of class struggle, and certain types of social facts”.
Now that the connection between multimedia works and society has already been established, it is time to discuss what exact central themes the story Jurassic Park lays out in relation to contemporary society. For the record, the existence of these concepts can be seen as the main reason why Jurassic Park is still being patronized by a lot of fans and readers even after more than thirty years since it was first released.
The potential dangers of technology are something that is evidently being raised in the story by Michael Crichton. In the past decades, humans’ knowledge on different emerging and already-emerged technologies has grown to exponential levels. New devices and new (and) revolutionary methods of doing things are being discovered every year or any specified time frame.
If one is going to follow the exponentially upward trend that the field of technology (within the context of various industries) has followed, then one can only speculate, with varying levels of accuracy, how society future generations fast forward from now would look like, how people, behave, and whether it would still be considered as a safe place to live in. The story of the Jurassic Park perfectly embodies this kind of fear of uncertainty.
In the original Jurassic Park story, for example, the story revolves around a period wherein the level of technology that man has been capable of mustering has reached a point wherein they could already control bring back the dinosaurs back to life. Now, for a brief background of the original story, the dinosaurs refer to an already extinct creature; they existed during the Jurassic era some millions of years ago. There in the Jurassic Park, John Hammond, a key person from InGen (the organization mainly responsible for the dinosaur’s modern existence), proposed the use of genetic engineering technologies to clone the dinosaurs and create a zoo out of the cloned species in what was to be called the Jurassic Park. Everything was planned based on the assumption that they could completely control everything until it turned out that they could not.
Today, with knowledge in the field of technology, one can be ahead of everyone else. However, the upside risks may also be proportionally high. Because much of the technologies available today are not yet completely understood, some skeptics have voiced out concern as to the potential of certain revolutionary technologies to accidentally cause the destruction of this planet or the extinction of mankind.
Although this idea of skepticism may be extreme, it is evident that people in society are well aware of it as evidenced by the fact that authors of new books keep on feeding them with novels that represent this kind of apprehension; and the fact that despite the continuous stream of release of such, they (i.e. the people) keep on patronizing them. For example, books about destruction as a result of technological innovation have been released and they are proliferating faster than ever.
Jurassic Park was a story conceptualized in the 90s. More than thirty years has passed and people are still skeptical, pessimistic even, about the way how humans have grown accustomed and dependent on various technologies. The development of the Jurassic Park is mainly based on Malcolm’s Chaos Theory. Ian Malcolm was a mathematician who starred in the original novel. He proposed a theory called Chaos Theory.
This theory suggests that it is not a mere plausibility but a probability that the island of dinosaurs that they created would start to behave (maybe not now but in the future) in an unpredictable and uncontrollable fashion and that it would turn out to be an accident waiting to happen, despite the level and sophistication of the technology humans had access to during the time the story was set. Another important notion raised by the theory suggests that life in all forms has the tendency to exceed all barriers. The dinosaurs basically represent a life form just like any other forms (of life) has the tendency to exceed barriers, even technological barriers.
This combined with the humans’ (from the story) belief that their knowledge of technology was infallible, created the disaster that one now knows as the disaster in Jurassic Park. The ability of the humans to control the dinosaurs, bring them back to life, and enclose them in an isolated park was fueled by their achievement milestones in the field of DNA research.
There were numerous characters in the story that cautioned the perpetrators of the failure (that created the conflict or the dilemma) about the potential dangers of the technology they were starting to play with, saying that they may be dealing with something they do not completely understand or even know how to fully control. As it turns out in the story of the Jurassic Park, gene splicing was a product of technology that proved to be too complex for the humans to completely understand and control, as evidenced by the mess that the dinosaurs that sprawled from the Jurassic Park created.
In conclusion, all the evidences presented in this paper from previously published literatures as well as inherent evidences from the original story, suggest that the story was created with the guidance of man’s apprehension to the potential dangers of technology or overreliance or dependence to it. Humans were a product of evolution and technology, as it appears, is one of the main tools that are being used in contemporary society, for humans to further evolve. Unfortunately, one can never prevent skeptics from airing their thoughts and the products of those thoughts have so far been evident and prevalent in stories of fiction like the Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton.
Works Cited
Albrecht, M. "The Relationship of Literature and Society." American Journal of Sociology (1954): 425. Print.
Funk, J., et al. "Violence Exposure in Real-life, video games, television, movies, and the Internet: Is there Desensitization." Journal of Adolescence (2004): 23-39.
Niemiec, R. and S. Schulenberg. "Understanding Death Attitudes: The Integration of Movies, Positive Psychology, and Meaning Management." Journal of Death Studies (2011): 387-407. Print.
