"Money," a popular social satire in its day, has the feel of a play that was funny and pertinent when it was first produced, in 1840, when it would have functioned as a mirror to a caste-obsessed upper-class audience.
According to one empiricist tradition, experience functions as a mirror, reflecting what is before the subject, without any manipulation by the subject's mind.
Not only can I use it to check my Hotmail account and surf the Internet, but the mobile also functions as a mirror, a flashlight, a camera, a video recorder and a music player.
The heart should function as a mirror, responding to the current situation without storing anything up, and this is possible only if the heart is emptied of all knowledge.
A second, and in some ways more profound observation, has to do with the possibility that we "attract" to us people or situations that will function as a mirror for our own education.
Meanwhile, another group has set its sights on building the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT)—whose seven monolithic 8.4-meter mirrors, arranged like flower petals, will function as a primary mirror 24.5 meters in diameter.
Lou Bloom is frightening exactly because of the way he functions as a blank mirror, reflecting back our own pushy obsessions and low-simmering rage.
Though offering a three-hour snapshot of a sprawling subject, "Shut Up and Dribble" expresses how the NBA has functioned as a societal mirror in a way that baseball, football and hockey rarely achieve.
One way to make sense of this is through the Aristotelian idea that friends function as a kind of mirror of each other: insofar as friendship rests on similarity of character, and insofar as I can have only imperfect direct knowledge about my own character, I can best come to know myself both the strengths and weaknesses of my character by knowing a friend who reflects my qualities of character.
