I believe that the vision of a "perfect" superhighway future in the 1939 World's far was more hype than reality as the fair created real problems with its vision of suburbia and cars. The reason for this being is that the whole things was envisioned sort of dream-like. "Inside the perisphere you step off the escalator onto one of two balcony rings rotating slowly in opposite directions, one directly above the other. As you step onto the balcony you are inside a short tunnellike section, but you soon rotate out the tunnel into the great awesome space of the perisphere itself." (Gelernter 17.) This quote is one of the many that are made up from the author's imagination. I feel as if the story was easily created into the reader's mind because of the visuals and colors that were incorportaed into the reading.
Altough there was quite a lot of creativity put into The Lost world of the Fair, it did bring a vision for fast transportation into the story The Building of a Superhighway Future at the New York World's Fair by Paul Mason Fotsch. In this exhibit, like the fair as a whole, it emphasized hope for the future at a time when daily life for many contained fear and uncertainty. It was expected that the new technology would help to bring on a better future, and the progress of technology was embodied in the rapid progression of cars in the Futurama. Even though an advancement in technology and trasnportation sounds great, alot of bad came from it as well. The growth of automobile production was increased, which meant more fumes were let out into the ozone layer, even though a suburban development was being conjured up, it also endangered the environment that surrounds us. It congested an unhealthy environment of the city.
To conclude, even though David Gelernter brought us something out of the ordinary and amazing to read (in my opinion) it was more of a hype rather than a reality. It brought creativity to future technological ideas that are only seen in films. Although this was unrealisitc, it did create real problems with the vision of suburbia. In the sense that even though a fast pace highway would take people to their location extremely fast due to the nature of the "fast paced" highways's some bad had to come from it. This brings me to the position that alot of people are in now. Jobs have been jeopardized because robots (technology) can now do the work for human beings. Yes, technology might advance us but from everything good, must come something bad.
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