Introduction
The computers that appeared in American popular culture during the
decades leading up to the personal computer age (roughly 1950-1980)
occasioned the projection of a broad range of cultural fantasies, hopes
and anxieties, not just about the increasingly powerful role of
technology in daily life, but about the ontological and epistemological
status of humans in an increasingly technologized world. This
was nowhere more apparent than in the feature films and network
television of the 1950s through the 1970s, where mainframe computers –
often decommissioned IBM air defense systems – made dozens of
appearances. Whether these machines merely provided a high-tech ambiance
or catalyzed a central narrative conceit, they offer a revealing
glimpse of the gender, racial and political dynamics surrounding
computer technology as refracted by film and TV at the dawn of the
digital age. While manufacturers including IBM and Burroughs were
developing active public relations campaigns to entice women into the
technology industries and neutralize anxieties about computers in the
workplace, Hollywood relentlessly – and sometimes with uncanny
prescience – opposed emergent digital technologies to core American
ideologies of freedom, privacy and equality.
It is not
surprising to find that even lightweight, commercial entertainment
genres such as romantic comedies and detective TV shows are engaged,
however obliquely, in consequential, if sometimes superficial or
contradictory, forms of cultural critique. This project departs from the
established conventions of symptomatic reading that have emerged in the
study of popular culture in two ways. First, the goal of this project
is to take seriously the critique of computing culture posed by TV and
movies during this period by looking closely at the substance of these
critiques rather than reducing them to reflections of developments in
the socio-economic world. Second, this text will take advantage of its
online publication format to present access to extensive quotations from
original media sources and experiments with the compositing of visual
critiques through simultaneous juxtaposition. In addition to the
embedded media clips presented in this study, all original media files
are available for high-resolution download from the web archive Critical Commons.
The
movement of computers from military-funded, university-based research
labs into the workplace occurred over a period spanning many years, with
rapid penetration in certain areas of American business such as
accounting and insurance, and slower growth in others. During this time,
commercial media, including feature films and network television,
experienced a significantly faster proliferation of depictions of
on-screen computing. With both audiences and writers largely unburdened
by direct experience with real-world computing machinery, these
cinematic and televisual depictions were free to explore and express a
wide range of cultural imaginings. While many of these representations
may be dismissed as lacking in substance or sophistication, a great many
more may be viewed as constitutive of a legitimate critique of the
growing presence of computers in daily American life. This project will
alternately address the broad contours of cultural discourse on film and
TV and perform close, analytical readings of a select number of
examples. Through this combination of close and distant reading, I will
argue that the majority of cinematic and televisual depictions of early
computing fall into one of three primary modes of critique. These
critiques, still nascent in the late 1950s through the 1970s, correlate
with continuing concerns about issues of privacy, identity and access in
networked computing of the present day.
decades leading up to the personal computer age (roughly 1950-1980)
occasioned the projection of a broad range of cultural fantasies, hopes
and anxieties, not just about the increasingly powerful role of
technology in daily life, but about the ontological and epistemological
status of humans in an increasingly technologized world. This
was nowhere more apparent than in the feature films and network
television of the 1950s through the 1970s, where mainframe computers –
often decommissioned IBM air defense systems – made dozens of
appearances. Whether these machines merely provided a high-tech ambiance
or catalyzed a central narrative conceit, they offer a revealing
glimpse of the gender, racial and political dynamics surrounding
computer technology as refracted by film and TV at the dawn of the
digital age. While manufacturers including IBM and Burroughs were
developing active public relations campaigns to entice women into the
technology industries and neutralize anxieties about computers in the
workplace, Hollywood relentlessly – and sometimes with uncanny
prescience – opposed emergent digital technologies to core American
ideologies of freedom, privacy and equality.
It is not
surprising to find that even lightweight, commercial entertainment
genres such as romantic comedies and detective TV shows are engaged,
however obliquely, in consequential, if sometimes superficial or
contradictory, forms of cultural critique. This project departs from the
established conventions of symptomatic reading that have emerged in the
study of popular culture in two ways. First, the goal of this project
is to take seriously the critique of computing culture posed by TV and
movies during this period by looking closely at the substance of these
critiques rather than reducing them to reflections of developments in
the socio-economic world. Second, this text will take advantage of its
online publication format to present access to extensive quotations from
original media sources and experiments with the compositing of visual
critiques through simultaneous juxtaposition. In addition to the
embedded media clips presented in this study, all original media files
are available for high-resolution download from the web archive Critical Commons.
The
movement of computers from military-funded, university-based research
labs into the workplace occurred over a period spanning many years, with
rapid penetration in certain areas of American business such as
accounting and insurance, and slower growth in others. During this time,
commercial media, including feature films and network television,
experienced a significantly faster proliferation of depictions of
on-screen computing. With both audiences and writers largely unburdened
by direct experience with real-world computing machinery, these
cinematic and televisual depictions were free to explore and express a
wide range of cultural imaginings. While many of these representations
may be dismissed as lacking in substance or sophistication, a great many
more may be viewed as constitutive of a legitimate critique of the
growing presence of computers in daily American life. This project will
alternately address the broad contours of cultural discourse on film and
TV and perform close, analytical readings of a select number of
examples. Through this combination of close and distant reading, I will
argue that the majority of cinematic and televisual depictions of early
computing fall into one of three primary modes of critique. These
critiques, still nascent in the late 1950s through the 1970s, correlate
with continuing concerns about issues of privacy, identity and access in
networked computing of the present day.
Begin this path: Introduction
- Three Modes of Critique
- On the deleterious effects of cyberlibertarianism
- Two Views of Cyberlibertarianism: Rockford Files (1978) and Mannix (1967)
- Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970)
- Billion Dollar Brain (1967)
- The Rise and Demise of the Electronic B.R.A.I.N.
- Technological Reversals: The Batman (1943) vs. Batman (1966-68)
Discussion of "Introduction"
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