It is characteristic of the socially normative critique to find computers that were developed for scientific, military or industrial uses deployed by Hollywood in comforting narrative contexts that emerge from daily life. Thus, early depictions of mainframe computers most often focus on applications such as dating, gambling or other everyday–and sometimes only vaguely computational–activities. A subliminal if not a conscious goal of these narratives appears to be the neutralization of cultural anxieties related to emerging computational technologies. In the case of a film such as Desk Set, it is easy to imagine IBM's explicit motivation for disarming or trivializing very real labor issues associated with the computerization of private industry. But how can we understand network television's repeated framing of computers as unthreatening to existing gender, race and economic relations as seen in several of the examples in this path? In fact, the complete picture is slightly more complex.

Network television is consistently engaged in the cultural processing of social disruption and unresolvable conflicts (for example, disparities of race and class). While the economic interests of the film and TV industries are generally aligned with the evolution of technologized capitalism, this seems like an insufficient explanation for their apparent collusion in constructing reassuring narratives about mainframe computers in particular. I believe the cultural imperative for ad-sponsored TV shows airing in a competitive weekly viewing context creates pressure to develop narrative content that resonates with contemporary social issues, which in the 1960s included the emergence of digital computing. Before the decade's end, it seemed that nearly every TV show that was reasonably positioned to include a "computer narrative" had done so. In general, the narrative trajectory followed one of two paths: 1. Computers appear as magical problem-solving devices capable of vastly greater abilities than their real world, number-crunching counterparts; or 2. Computers pose a grave threat–either through the dangers of inhuman bureaucratization or catastrophic malfunction–that must be narratively resolved (frequently via the three modes of critique structuring this project).

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