Comparing Egger's The Circle And Where D You Go Bernadette
1471 Words6 Pages
In 1964, Marshall McLuhan first used the phrase “the medium is the message.” At its core, the phrase implies that the meaning of a message can be influenced and changed by the medium by which the message is received. The two novels The Circle by Dave Eggers and Where’d You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple both illuminate this concept through the construction of the worlds depicted and the ways in which the books written. Selmple’s novel attacks this concept more transparently, by having most of the story be told through e-mails, documents, faxes, and other second-hand mediums. Each different medium was carefully chosen, and they each give us more information beyond what is explicitly said. Egger’s novel is told by narration from the main character,…show more content… The first screen is where she responds to customer inquiries. The second is where she can communicate with her supervisors and other people within the circle. Her third screen is a social one, containing her Zing feeds. Zing is a social media platform that allows user to comment, like, and share content with the Circle community. Later, a fourth screen is added. Once Mae has gotten used to working in customer experience, the company puts her in charge of overseeing the “newbies” hired into the same job. The fourth screen is her way to interact with those in her pod. It is where the new hires who can send questions they don’t know how to answer to Mae. It is then Mae’s job to answer them herself. Finally, a fifth screen is added. This screen contains CircleSurveys, a program that gages her opinions based on certain questions and uses that data to benefit the Circle’s consumers. Mae learns about the screens from Gina, a woman from CircleSocial, another subdivision of the company. Gina makes a strong point of mentioning that community is the most important value to the organization. “We want to make sure that you can be a human being here, too. We want this to be a workplace, sure, but it should also be a humanplace. And that means the fostering of community.” She proceeds to then stress the importance of all the screens, and while she says some are more important than others, she emphasizes that all of…show more content… Dan, one of Mae’s supervisors, calls her in for a meeting early on, and expresses his sentiment that on-campus events are basically required. “We see this workplace as a community, and every person who works here is part of that community. And to make it all work it requires a certain level of participation.” But physical presence is not the only requirement. All the members of the Circle are ranked based on their social interactions through their Zing feed. At first Mae is hesitant to use her Zing feed, telling Dan she didn’t think “[her] interest[s]...rose to the level where it warranted joining a discussion group, or, you know, following anything.” but the longer she stays at the Circle, the more she gets used to it, to the point where she is sucked into the competition of trying to boost her PartiRank as high as possible. She suddenly becomes very liberal about posting, sharing pictures of events she goes to, opinions of happenings at the Circle and beyond, liking groups, sending smiles and frowns to other posts. Unfortunately, because everyone of the 10,000+ members at The Circle is creating groups, posts, e-mails, and other Zings, one has to become adept at navigating his or her way through all the messages that come across that social screen. In this case, the sheer quantity of messages that show up in Mae’s feed seem to dilute the importance of the posts.