The Time Machine

• Primary Blog Question
  • When compared, the two film clips help illuminate a key question for this course: How has our relationship to technology changed over time?
    
    
    I feel that our relationship to technology nowadays is a very dependent one. Many of us use technology every day, and we would be hard pressed trying to stay a few hours let alone an entire day without using some form of technology. The first movie presented technology as the pursuit of scientific invention for the sake of science, to understand how the fourth dimension, time, can be manipulated and perhaps to study its effects. The inventor of the time machine in this movie did not spend anytime pondering on the business side of his invention, which made his friends wonder why would he have invented "such a contraption" in the first place. Similarly, the inventor of the time machine in the second movie did not contemplate using his invention as a product to sell; however, in contract to the first movie, this inventor had a very personal goal to reach with his time machine. So, not science for science's sake, but for personal gain. 
    
    
     
• Secondary Blog Questions
  • How has film technology changed?
  • How have we changed as film viewers?
  • How has our understanding of time evolved?
  • How does fiction/science fiction impact our relationship to technology?
    
    
    Clearly, the use of CGI has drastically changed our vision of what special effects are. When we watch movies released in the 50s or 60s, we tend to be somewhat disappointed or perhaps amused at how film makers were able to produce special effects on camera. Today, we expect special effects to seem as real as we would imagine those effects to be were they a reality. Indeed, this causes us to desire more and more from the tech "gadgets" we possess.