Allegory of the screen: Plato, the Matrix, and mobile testing. (Part I)

Part I   

   Some 2,400 years ago Plato wrote The Republic, his most famous work and one that to this day has inspired philosophical thought and challenged our concepts of reality and truth.  In Book 7 of The Republic Plato's main character, Socrates presents the Allegory of the Cave.  Imagine a deep, dark cave hidden from the light of the outside world.  The cave is filled with slaves, they are bound from birth in a manner in which the cannot move.  Their heads are positioned by their unknown captors to face a wall upon which shadows form a puppet show of the outside world which they have never seen.  They are not permitted to see anything but this wall in front of them. These shadowy silhouettes they see on the wall are cast from a fire behind them and voices are added which may or may not accurately align with the images they intend to portray.  The quality of the shows are determined by the slaves based on their perceptions of what they should see with no concept of what of what is real and how the image got there.  One day a slave breaks loose and escapes to the outside world.  Bright light, truth, and perhaps some information overload destroy the comfort that the slave had once known.  And once truth is known going back his former "reality" becomes impossible.  

    Jump ahead to 1999 where Andy and Larry Wachowski gave Plato's story a makeover in their movie The Matrix.  In it, the main character Neo is the former slave who becomes enlightened to the realities of his world.  Once exposed he makes the conscious decision that he cannot go back to the false world in which the rest of us live.  In a Platonistic way he seeks truth and takes the red pill.  He's able to navigate behind the source code of the perceived world and manipulate it to act in ways we cannot conceive.  However, we are left with the question of whether our lives are better and richer than that lived within the matrix.  The character Cypher (bad guy) makes this perfectly clear when he argues that had he known truth he never would have chosen it and the red pill.

Cypher: "You know, I know this steak doesn't exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize? [Takes a bite of steak] Ignorance is bliss."

   The Matrix successfully took Plato's dark, subterranean world and adapted to the modern world of the Internet.  We all understand that everything we see on the Internet isn't real and know the sarcastic joke "it must be true, I saw it on the Internet."  The Matrix's use of the Internet allowed common people a medium to understand Plato's main philosophical question: if reality didn't exist as we know it, would we be happier knowing, or not? 

   People generally understand (hopefully) that the Internet, whether on your desktop of handset, isn't more than representation of millions of lines of code quickly assembled to give us a visual representation of what the content developer had intended.  Yet, most us are happier with what we see on the screen. More over, we're bothered when errors in the code or limitations of desktops / handsets create graphical experiences that don't conform to what we consider "real."

Next a much greater leap, one of thought.