Experiencing "The Matrix" - a presentation by undergrads in a Communication course on Media and Culture at UMass Amherst (February 2011).

1. Technology Versus US The Matrix

3. Walter Ong points out that the voice is the only medium that cannot be frozen; words disapper as soon as they are spoken. No freezeframe is possible, which makes the voice the only organic, living medium in the history of the species. The voice’s isolation from all the other senses, as we experience it on the telephone, highlights the fact that touch is our most deprived sense.

4. “By the Film’s end, his identity is made clear when he tells his archenemy, Agent Smith, “My name is Neo” just before “killing” him in the subway. By choosing his digital identity, he rejects a lifetime of programming and shows that he now knows that “The Matrix cannot tell you who you are.”

5. Similar to the Epsilon Diagram, the Matrix shows the connection between technology and our everyday lives. In our everyday lives, we live a persona through our social networks. You can be whoever you want to be online. This is similar to the Matrix, how these characters are completely different people in the “real world” and in this “Matrix world.”

6. Morpheus tells him that the secret he is on to is one that won’t go away, like a splinter in the mind. It is this: he’s a slave.

7. The purpose of the matrix is to turn humans into batteries (I.E. energy sources) for the machines to do their work. What is their work? To keep us humans enslaved by our own illusions, chief of which is that technology is not enslaving us, but actually liberating us.

8. Technology does not own us, but it does control us. It does not own us because we created technology, and we choose to let it control us, but we could end technological advances if need be.