The Wired Mind

A farm made up of human beings in fetal position, in liquid, with at tube used to feed through the mouth. All eyes are shut. All are dreaming. Dreaming of a life that they think they are living. Dreaming of a life they think is real.

Such was the reality that was introduced to us by the film The Matrix. When human beings are being controlled by "machines," electronic entities of their own making. Through the dream-like state the continues to fuel the mechanic existence, the human beings are unaware of the circular fate that awaits them - the endless dreamworld that they are now in.

I was awed by the premise of the movie and how it treats the seeming state of humanity as it is now. Like the movie's inhabitants, people now are also wired, glued in fact, to an entity as enigmatic and mechanical as the film's antagonist - the Internet.

Here we realize that we are now a part of a global society that is run by electronic information. We are defined by the vague e-mail addresses that we provide, we are described through the social networking accounts (Friendster, MySpace, Multiply) that we continue to fill with scraps of what we think is our humanity. We share information like it was perpetual, from the songs, to the videos that each of us talk about in virtual chatrooms.

Has this generation become a slave of its own machinations? Are we now living the movie that we think is still fiction? Or have we realized living in our own dreamworld is better than facing the real problems of disease, war, famine, hunger, and brokenness and depresion?

If you were asked to define the Internet based on your own experience, what would it be? What should it be? Seriously.