The true meaning of "Paradigm" is actually revealed in Act 14. Remember Roger the wanderer is reading a Paradigm newspaper? The "Big O" comic strip serialized in the paper is eye-catching, but in fact what is most important in the entire scene lies
behind. Recall the strong wind then blows away the paper, but right before that, the camera shows us what is on the back of it. A news report -- written by Michael Seebeth! -- is titled: "Paradigm Shift." Below there is a section title: "Science Progresses By Leaps and Bound." (See attachment)
The reference is unmistakably clear.
The Big O creators here is referring to a famous book by Thomas Kuhn named
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), where the extremely influential notion of "paradigm" was proposed for the first time. According to Kuhn, each scientific revolution is brought about NOT by gradual accumulation of empirical discoveries as we usually believe, but by a sudden "paradigm shift," that is a drastic change in our fundamental conceptual framework (model or persepective, if you like) through which we interpret our data and findings. What makes Newton and Eienstein different is not the "facts" they collect and possess, but the diverse paradigms in which they respectively worked. Radically speaking, there is no "genuine" scientific progress, but only a transformation of the way we see and examine the world.
A paradigm shift usually occurs within a very short period of time if not overnight, like taking a great leap and bound or undergoing an earthquake, but paradoxically it is not easy to be fully articulated and captured. It takes place at a more unconscious level of the scientific community or a certain society. Once the paradigm has shifted, people in a new paradigm would find it impossible to make sense of what had once been taken for granted within another paradigm. So imagine by some "accident" you find yourself transported back or forth to a different paradigm, you would certainly feel like being thrown into a horrorifyingly strange landscape. No doubt Roger the wanderer would feel so lost in a Paradigm other than what he is familiar with. (Interestingly, visually this difference is represented as between New York, the backdrop of the entire show, and Chicago, the setting of Act 14.)
The entire story of
The Big O can be therefore read as a story of paradigm shifts: each earthquakelike shift leads to amnesia and loss of continuity. Actually, this is even closer to the vision of the French philosopher Michel Foucault's
The Order of Things (1966), only that he used the word "episteme" instead of "paradigm," but no doubt he was under the influence of Kuhn. The Big O world is a post-Kuhn or post-Foucault world. Before Kuhn and Foucault, no one really "felt" any paradigm shift; but since then, we have become highly anxious about it, now that we are told we have lost our "memories" of the previous paradigms.
The Big O is obviously informed by quite a number of advanced critical and literary theories. "Paradigm" is only one of them.
