Welcome to the Post-Modern World

Summary of Reading:

This week’s chapter suggests that in the post-modern era we are “forced to be free” (7). In the pre-modern era, social constructions of reality were binary in nature. Such societies did not entertain the possibility of other different world views existing alongside their own. In the modern era, people began to suspect that other realities existed whereas the post-modern era forces us to make choices about our realities.

Outside Example:

One example I thought of while reading the chapter was the movie “The Matrix”. “The Matrix” is a sci-fi action film centering around a computer hacker, Neo, who begins to suspect that the world is not as it seems following repeated encounters online with the phrase “the Matrix”. When the stranger Morpheus offers to show him the truth of his reality, Neo discovers that the world (as he knows it) ended in the early 21st century in a war between humans and intelligent machines. The machines modeled “the Matrix” on the world they conquered, keeping humans pacified in the simulated world while the AI harvested bioelectric power for their own use. Neo joins Morpheus in the fight against the machines and to free the humans they’ve subjugated.

Connection to Reading:

In the film, Neo must make a choice about his reality. Morpheus offers him two pills – a red and a blue one. Swallowing the red pill would reveal the truth of the Matrix while the blue pill would allow Neo to continue living a comfortable yet oblivious life in the Matrix. Neo ultimately chooses the red pill and awakes to an entirely different concept of what the world is like – a life as a slave at the hands of the machines.