Pixelated Consciousness: Media Ecology and the Screen
Gaze in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake
Dilpreet
Kour
Ph.D. Research Scholar
Department of English
University of Jammu
Jammu and Kashmir, India
&
Prof.
Sadaf Shah
Department of English,
University of Jammu,
Jammu and Kashmir, India.
Abstract: Contemporary studies have largely
paid attention on the process by which literary texts are converted into visual
narratives. The present paper investigates how the screen mediated culture
changes the focus in other directions. It analyses Oryx
and Crake (2003) by
Margaret Atwood through the theoretical lens of
media ecology to argue that in contemporary times, screens serves the
function of media environments that influence the feelings, emotions,
perception, memory, and socially situated experiences. Based on close textual
reading, the study reflects on the perceptual logic of screen mediated culture.
The analysis further reveals how the novel links repeated exposure to
screen-mediated violence with emotional detachment and diminished ethical
engagement. Ultimately, by bringing together literary text and media ecology,
this study contributes to contemporary debates on digital media culture by
illustrating the manner in which screen technologies influence both narrative
forms and contemporary subjectivity.
Keywords:
Media, Ecology, Culture, Literary texts, Visual narratives
Introduction
Traditional
scholarship on literary texts as well as the cinema has primarily centred on
the way films transformed the literary texts into digital or visual narratives,
but in recent age of digital innovations, these cultures and texts mutually
shape one another. Human emotions, feelings, communication, as well as everyday
experiences are incessantly influenced by the digital screens, smart phones,
television, computers, and various other social networking platforms. Present
day literature has begun to represent this disjointed visual content and hyper
mediated qualities of this screen centric culture, because digital media
increasingly structures the way individuals engage with and perceive the real
world issues. Thus literature has transitioned away from being the only source
for the adaptation, it has rather become progressively more determined by the
structure and logic of these mediated technologies. Marshall McLuhan in Understanding
Media: The Extensions of Man (1964), observes that, “after more than a century
of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a
global embrace, abolishing both space and time” (3).
The literary
narratives assimilate and reproduce the visual and structural qualities of
digital ecosystem and this condition can be conceptualized as an instance of
reverse adaptation. Though the conventional adaptation studies investigate the
transition from text to screen based formats, the present paper explores the
reverse transformation that is, the influence exerted by screen mediated
culture on literary form and the consciousness of the audiences. The paper
explore the process of reverse adaptation through a mode of digitally mediated
perception that is constituted by long-drawn-out interaction with the screen mediated
visual representation and digital information flow. The paper builds on the
theoretical perspective of media ecology to study the screen gaze that is the
way individuals interpret and experience the reality without relying on direct
human emotions but through technologically constructed representations of the
reality. In this sense Margaret Atwood’s Oryx
and Crake, serves as a context where the individuals increasingly
experience reality through technologically mediated representations presented
on the screens. In the novel, characters like Jimmy and Crake spend much of
their developmental years engaging with the screens and frequently accesses
online content which features violence, pornography, and other disturbing
content. Consuming this content gradually influence their emotional responses
and also reduces their capacity for empathetic engagement with other
individuals around them. The study also underscores that Atwood presents
digital media as an environment that fundamentally reshapes the way individuals
perceive things, their emotional responses and subjectivity rather than viewing
it solely as a technological tool, this resonates with Marshall McLuhan’s
(1964) notion of “medium is the message” (9).
The novel has
been explored through a number of perspectives and various scholars have also
analyzed related themes as well like, Katherine Parsons (2025) describes that “Oryx and Crake offers a unique
perspective on the correlation between the death of a people and the death of
their language,” (1) depicting cultural collapse as inseparable from the
erosion of meaningful communication. In this sense, Marta Korbel (2023) argues
that the novel critiques late modern neoliberal capitalism and depicts a
society controlled by technology and corporate power. Similarly, few other
scholars illustrate that Margaret Atwood’s fiction warns readers about the
dystopian implications of unrestrained scientific ambitions, genetic
engineering, and technological overreach. Although these approaches have
effectively examined the corporate dominations, risks of technological
advancements, and erosion of linguistic complexity, but they have largely
overlooked the role of screens and media as mediating mechanisms in the
development of human consciousness through various mediums. The paper addresses
the existing gap by conceptualizing the screen gaze as an interface that
mediates and normalizes emotional detachment and overindulgence with
technology. It employs a qualitative textual analysis and close reading by
drawing on media ecology as its central theoretical framework to explore the
relationship between media environments and various literary representations.
Through close examination, the study pays specific attention to the
representation of digital media consumption, scattered memory, vicarious
violence, along with the view of perception within the novel to investigate how
Atwood embodies the logic of digital specifically visual media into literary
forms.
Media ecology
is a field that is advanced by scholars like Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman.
They examine the way in which communication technologies shape perceptions,
values, memories, thoughts, feelings, as well as patterns of social
organization. The concept of media ecology views media as an environment that
instead of positioning advanced technologies as neutral tools constitutes the
foundations of human experiences. In this regard Emory A. Griffin (2011), asserts that, “a media shapes
us because we partake of it over and over until it becomes an extension of ourselves”
(323). This highlights the processes through which communication technologies
transforms modes of sensory perception. Building on this perspective to explore
the relationship between technology and human behaviour, the paper analyses how
the screen or media oriented culture operates as an engaging environment which
determines the representation of experienced world of Oryx and Crake and the patterns of its narrative structuring. The
paper further argues that the narrative style used by Atwood in the novel that
is the episodic chronology, immediate shift between memories and ongoing events
resemble the fragmented experiences of dealing with digital screens and
continuous online content flow. It highlights the impact of digital media which
reshapes the memory, social relationships, along with the selfhood. In this
sense, the paper highlights features of perception based logic rather than
depicting only screen mediated culture. While already available research on the
novel has comprehensively investigated novel using the perspectives of
dystopia, posthumanism, ecocriticism, etc. fewer studies have analysed the way
screen technologies are capable of shaping the emotional consciousness of the
humans. The study is relevant on the grounds that it examines the relationship
between the literary forms and the screen culture (digital media). By building
on the media ecology, the paper contributes to the current discussions
revolving around the cultural consequences of media/digital saturation in the
present day technologically advanced society by illustrating how within the
literary and digital representation, the interactive media environment shape
the feelings, thinking, emotions, memory, and the identity. Ultimately, the
paper examines the existence of Crake’s genetically engineered Crakers’ while
raising important questions about the alternative forms of life without social
organization. Thus the framework of media ecology helps to illustrate that the
screen mediated technologies restructure literary form, emotional lives of
humans, and modern subjectivity, instead of just transforming the communication
and entertainment industry.
Oryx and Crake by
Margaret Atwood depicts a dystopian world which is dominated by the
overindulgence with the technology caused by genetic engineering, digital
media, surveillance, and uncontrolled corporate power. Through the novel,
Atwood portrays the correlation between changes that occur because of
technological excess and environmental crisis, and results in the alteration of
human identity. Corporate greed of Crake (childhood friend of the protagonist
Jimmy) leads to a global catastrophe and the plot revolves around how Jimmy
also known by the name Snowman struggles to survive after the global
catastrophe has wiped out the human population. Through Jimmy’s fragmentary
recollections of life before the catastrophe, Atwood pictures a dystopian
society where screens, commercial entertainment industries, and digital forms
of socialization progressively influence the experiences of the humans.
Therefore the fragmented world of Oryx
and Crake offers a useful site to analyse how the continuous screen gaze
determine the contemporary literary representations by reshaping the human
consciousness. In this regard, Marshall McLuhan (1964) argues that, “The use of
any kind of medium or extension of man alters the patterns of interdependence
among people, as it alters the ratios among our senses” (103). Thus the
communication technologies reshape the sensory experiences by which the reality
can be experienced and restructured along with just transmitting the
information.
The novel
highlights the transformed sensory environment, by employing the techniques of
disjointed memories, continuously shifting the focus towards the episodic
sequences from before to after and vice versa. These shifts echo the
experiences of engaging with the digital media, aligning with the observation
of remediation by Bolter and Grusin (2000) where they describe it as a process
using which one medium integrates the constitutive properties of the other.
This remediation of the screen gaze becomes evident during the times when Jimmy
and Crake surf on internet for hours and hours. Both of them sit before the
monitor and engage with the outside world through the computer generated images
and visual spectacles. They continuously consume disturbing visual content like
graphic executions, surgeries, autopsies, and porn through flattened sequence
of visual fragments which are catalogued and clicked without pause. The
portrayal of these visuals diminishes the distinction between categories of
content being consumed online and the phenomenon being experienced within the
same structure, resembling what the scholars like Lev Manovich (2001), describe
as database logic, where informational content is experienced as segmented
entity instead of an element of a rational narrative sequence. He says, “Many
new media objects do not tell stories; they do not have a beginning or an end;
in fact, they do not have any development, thematically, formally, or otherwise
that would organize their elements into a sequence” (218). Thus the database
becomes, “dynamic and subjective” (243).
Margaret
Atwood’s narrative style assign equivalent weight to atrocities, entertainment,
and commodities to replicate the sensory flattening impact that is linked with
digital environments, echoing Marshall McLuhan states, “medium is the message.”
This resonates with Marta Korbel’s (2023) observation that the novel critiques
the technologically mediated forms of neoliberal capitalism, where the
experiences and consciousness of humans profoundly become objects that help in
circulation, consumption, and exchange of the digital content. The mediating
influence of the screen gaze transcends the boundaries of the external
perception and begins to play an important role in the representation of
memory. This becomes apparent when Jimmy after the catastrophe, tries to
recollect the past, not through continual self reflection but through visual
and cinematic imagery framed through his closed eyelids, and feel running like
old documentary footage whose colours had begun to fade. This underscores that
Jimmy revisits the past through the screen mediated culture and not through
physical experiences. Atwood’s use of the visual imagery therefore shows that
human memory and perception is deeply influenced and shaped by the screen
culture, making it one of the crucial lens through which reality could be
comprehended. This notion aligns with Katherine Parson’s (2025) argument that Oryx
and Crake portrays a cultural erosion of meaningful communication, because as
the conventional forms grow weaker, screen culture as well as the visual
mediation arises as forms of leading mode of communication through which
experiences whether personal or collective are reconfigured.
The
novel explores the sentimental detachment from the physical world and its
implications cannot be explained solely on the basis of availability of digital
content, instead the perceptual environment through which content is perceived
also plays a crucial role. Thus the screen functions as a medium that separates
the viewers from the real world sufferings. This difference becomes noticeable
when both Jimmy and Crake watch the real world violence like deaths, protests,
and other violent contents through the screen while eating chocolates. The
screen therefore acts as a barrier between real world and digital content. The
study reimagines a social environment, where the repeated exposure to the
online violent content does not destroy the empathy but contributes to the
becoming emotionally unavailable and disengagement from the ethical concerns.
The conditions under which Jimmy and Crake watch the content transform their
perception, resonating with Marshall McLuhan’s (1964) observation that the depiction
of real world issues through the screens creates a media environment that
frequently extend beyond the explicit online material they deliver. This
emotional detachment changed the way Crake view the world, highlighting that
the excess use of technological developments becomes dangerous when detached
from the responsibility grounded in empathy. The novel does not present
technological advancements as innately destructive, rather show it as a
consequence of uncontrolled use of technology, where it becomes more dominant
and focused on efficiency, technological rationality and paying less attention
towards ethical reflection of right and wrong.
Crake designed
a whole new form of humans, i.e., Crakers, with the help of technology, as an
effort to get rid of harmful human characteristics like conflict,
dissatisfaction, jealousy, symbolic excess and hierarchical ambition. Crake
believes that digital media represents a mode of perception that is shaped by
mediation and consumption. He asserts that these representations act as sources
of instability, highlighting technology and its effects. This resonates with
Neil Postman’s (1993) idea that, “every technology is both a burden and a
blessing, not either-or, but this-and-that” (9). As a result of this, Crakers
exhibit no emotional capacity as Crake eliminates art, literature, and media
arguing that things like visual art, cinema and books produce illusions and
ultimately results in a society that is grounded in envy and suffering. Thus
Crakers can be shown as an experiment which explores the possibility of life
beyond the screen. However, despite all these efforts, the Crakers eventually
begin to create stories and mythic representations of both Oryx and Crake as
their gods. This challenges the notion that human and even posthuman life
(Crakers) can exist completely outside the systems of representations,
foregrounding that meaning making is not simply a technological habit but a
deeper cultural impulse.
Conclusion
The study shows how the screen mediated culture
extensively reshapes human consciousness, alter perception, and behaviour
through the media ecology. Through fragmented narration, emotional
estrangement, mediated memory, and alternative society of the Crakers, Atwood
explores the effects of a world that is increasingly organised through the
screens. The study therefore concludes that screen culture acts as a powerful
media environment which alters feelings, emotions, thinking, and social
relationships. It shows that repeated exposure to the mediated violent online
content results in emotional detachment as the viewers have already experienced
them through the screens. The paper also foregrounds the creation of Crakers as
a speculative attempt to escape the consequences of screen domination and
reimagines an alternative form of life which is beyond the influence of media
dominated culture. It neither completely rejects technological advancements nor
promotes a complete return to a pre-technological past. It contributes to the current discussions
about the impact of digital culture on human life by highlighting the relevance
of Atwood’s vision of a world that is increasingly shaped by screens and
emphasising the importance of examining how people perceive and respond to
reality.
Works Cited
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The Language of New Media. MIT Press, 2001.
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