I missed the 20th anniversary of the movie The Matrix, which transformed science fiction, cinema, and my life in a variety of ways. Just as today’s university students are too young to remember the movie as anything other than a “classic” their parents or an older sibling introduced them to, many readers of this blog may no longer recall that the original title of my blog was Exploring Our Matrix. It began as a venue for exploring side interests such as science fiction, and in doing so helped foster those interests and convert them into a research and teaching focus in their own right. Some of my earliest publications about science fiction focused on the Matrix. The blog also provided an outlet where I could find my voice while addressing issues that were controversial in the conservative Christian context that I had recently emerged from and still felt linked to. It also gave me a place to talk about my faith in ways that did not seem appropriate in a classroom at a secular university. It is probably no exaggeration to say that much of who I am and much that I have done in the past decade or so owes something to the Matrix franchise, at least indirectly.
The Matrix movies seem more relevant now than ever, as “deepfakes” bring us increasingly into a world in which we cannot trust our senses any longer. Here is one example:
Can information literacy skills help us to wake up, to take the red pill. Or do we need government oversight and not merely resistance?
See further articles about efforts to combat fake news that appeared recently in CNN and Inside Higher Ed.
Also of related interest (in ways that you will understand if you have seen the movie):
How I Learned to Stop Worrying About The Existence of An External World
Rumors of something new in the Matrix series being in the works by the Wachowski siblings was apparently just an illusion…
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