2001: A Space Odyssey

September 22, 2005

I’ve now experienced 2001: A Space Odyssey. While impressed with the technological forecasting and the expanse of time and space depicted in the film, I thought the film seemed quite representative of the particular cultural context of America in the 1960s. Though the film carefully imagined technological advancements, it failed to reconsider the social constructs of its own time – amongst the film’s characters, white men occupy positions of power almost exclusively and interact according to social mores vintage 1960s.

In 2005, we continue to embrace rapid technological change and forecast future trends, yet how often do we consider our own status quo and wonder how we’ll look to people half a century later? How much time do we invest in rethinking our social structures, our institutional rules, our cultural assumptions? What if we deeply questioned who we are and where we’re going? How then would we live? Those questions could lead to quite an odyssey.