When the Sleeper Wakes by H. G. Wells is an early example of the genre of dystopian futuristic novels. It reflects a general anxiety about the effects of technology on people's lives, a worry that has deep roots in the Industrial Revolution.
The first area in which Wells' work could be used to think about contemporary American society is the growth of income inequality. Although Wells' work was deliberately exaggerated and imaginative, technology has seemed to increase income inequality, albeit not quite in the way Wells imagined it. As you think through this issue, consider the current wealth gap based on education and the increasing lack of intergenerational income mobility.
The next area you might consider is how technology is used as a mechanism of social control. The advent of the "internet of things" and the ubiquity of GPS-enabled mobile phones give both corporations and the government access to an unprecedented amount of data about people as both individuals and aggregates, something Wells sees as a potential control mechanism.
Finally, you could think about the degree to which your life and the lives of your friends are saturated in mass and social media and how that is a form of the sort of immersive brainwashing described by Wells.
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