The first 12 chapters of Station Eleven left me thinking quite hard about what I would miss most about the Digital Age we are in now. I know that as a child who grew up surrounded with technology and easy access to the internet, I would have an immediate gut reaction of saying my phone or wifi or something to that effect. After this original reaction though, Station Eleven brought up all of the things that are 100 times more important than just one silly phone in the event of a catastrophe. Things like our cell phones are just a part of a past that is now contained in the wasteland of what I imagine to be city-wide landfills. I think things like not having access to medicine or having a permanent home might take the place of the most missed things of the pre-apocalyptic digital era in this book if I were to have lived in this type of scene with Kristen.
What really is intriguing in the chapters of 20 years post fall, is that there are so many still alive that don’t remember all this digital era nonsense. What would it be like to have almost no recollection of it and not be dependent on it like our society is today? If we aren’t dependent on technology and have somehow managed to figure out how to live without medics and pharmaceuticals, then I believe that things like food, safety, and water would be at the top of everyone’s priority list. However, Kristen and so many others don’t even live in houses! I understand the traveling theater and then giving life and beauty and joy to a landscape devoid of any type of happiness or other more digital type of entertainment, but what happened to all the houses? America is filled with suburbs and I don’t think those would’ve disappeared in this world, yet people are living in abandoned gas stations and Wendy’s and such. Why??? I want to know what happened to all the homes and houses!
