Race in the Construct - Lisa Nakamura pg 61-85

Recap: Lisa goes into the movies: Blade Runner and The Matrix, and the novels: Neuromancer and Snow Crash. She describes the origins of the cyberpunk mentality for movies and the idea of Asian’ism in the cyberpunk ideology. She talks about how the idea of the use of the Japanese basis for the local used to represent the common idea of where we might as a world society end up.

Comments: Her looks into the history how the cyberpunk view is interesting. I enjoyed the movies, Blade Runner and The Matrix, as I am more of sci-fi type of moviegoer. Having also read a lot of sci-fi books the cyberpunk view really did take off in the 80’s and the relation of having the Japanese back ground seem to become more important the more it moved along. In addition the inter mixing of races, not of the white nature, even created more interest as a possible future look at where we might end up. The homogenized view of our populace in the future with a specific race being in the great minority grows more and more true as we start to integrate more cultures into each other.
Side note: Sometimes I wonder about how people tend to put more into what someone does with movies. Granted the Matrix does have some interesting aspects to it but why can’t it just be that as a writer someone used their creativity and had a “cool” idea and put it to film, novel or what ever. Then everyone starts the judgment of what it is. Reading between the lines has become quite the career for people. It does get tiring now and then, about how people judge how something is meant to be. That is fine but please don’t try and force the idea onto others as if it is the only right answer.