Tron

The issues of corporation, originiality, and individuality, as presented in Tron, have become prominent in our world of technology. I wish I had the background knowledge to throw out names and company names as we did in class; however, the everyday consumer sees the limits (in selection) in technology consumerism when shopping for a computer, an ipod, or any technological-breakthrough product. Tron made me think about the authors, the creators of technology, and in thinking of names mentioned in class, the big names, I am sure there are hundreds of names lost in the process of production and sales that are the artistic inspiration and originiality behind the progress of technology, even behind the big names. Just as in THX1138, today names are lost, individuality blended behind the black and white brief-case-like laptops everyone carries around. Come to think of it, we all have a "screename" or some chosen expression of our identities on computers (that usually includes a number or two) that comes to represent the individual like a number among millions online, like THX1138. However, the names we give ourselves represents the individual behind it, just like a name, allowing individual expression and identity to continue to exist in a digital world.
The world in Tron, in incorporating reality and humans into the world of systems, bites, and programs, presents a concern for the individual and his/her ownership of ideas, while at the same time representing individuals within technology. This correlation between people in the real world and pieces of a system inside the computer relates the concept of how the user impacts and individualizes the piece of that system he/she controls. Representing the pieces inside with the same actors that play characters on the outside expresses an ownership and the reponcibility of a "user" to his/ her program. This connection not only accomplishes recognition for creators and artists, but suggests a greater meaning behind what people put into machines and computers. The pieces of an individual that they put into a creation(specifically into a computer) are still representative of the individual, whether digitized or still inside a person's head as an original idea. In this light, the representation of an individual as the pieces he she controls, as a user, in the computer, conveys a close connection between people and programs, one that would encourage people to express themselves through computers, computer games, and digital technology.