A so-called new technology is the object of fascination, hyperbole and concern. It is almost inevitably a field onto which a broad array of hopes and fears is projected and envisioned as a potential solution to, or possible problem for, the world at large. Technological development is one of the primary sites through which we can chart the desires and concerns of a given social context and the preoccupations of particular moments in history.
–Marita Sturken, Douglas Thomas and Sandra Ball-Rokeach, Technological Visions: The Hopes and Fears That Shape New Technologies (2004)

Technologies that are refracted through the lenses of cinema and television reveal both the cultural desires and anxieties of a given moment, as Sturken, Thomas and Ball-Rokeach's book Technological Visions (2004) ably demonstrates. But they may also be read as revealing insights about the state of the entertainment media industries themselves. The long list of films that decry the debauchery of television, particularly during its early decades may be read as directly symptomatic of the two industries' active economic rivalry and the threat posed by the new technology of television to the cultural hegemony of theatrical cinema. Likewise, the mid-1990s representations of the emerging technology of virtual reality–what Ellen Strain (1999) has termed "virtual virtual reality"–appeared to have been deliberately intended to overinflate consumer expectations, leading to inevitable disappointment and return to the comfort of linear time-based media delivered on cinema and TV screens. These 'critiques'–both explicit and implicit–serve to steer audiences away from the lure of new technologies and back in the direction of the status quo. So it was with the popular cultural imaginary during the early decades of mainframe computing.

The postwar computer industry remained agreeable to women, who played crucial roles as computer operators and programmers. IBM's "My Fair Ladies" recruitment campaign specifically targeted women with the promise of meaningful labor in a burgeoning industry. Described by Janet Abbate (2012, 65), "IBM produced an elaborate recruitment brochure for college-educated women in 1957, entitled "My Fair Ladies" after the recent Broadway hit. It pictured several women (real employees, not models) who worked for IBM as programmers or researchers and promised, 'If you are attracted by the challenge of a highly important position that will make full use of your talents and aptitudes…you'll like IBM.'" Abbate goes on to point out that women were often recruited based on the promise that computer work resembled traditionally "feminine" pursuits "such as knitting, music and cooking, thus casting women's participation in computing as natural and desirable." She suggests that this framing of women's work in the computer industry may have been complicit in socially normative strategies within the industry to preserve the perception of higher-level technical competence as a primarily masculine domain, even as this perception was actively belied by the large number of women serving as high-level programmers on major projects including IBM's SAGE air-defense system.

So how was women's presence in the computer industry refracted by Hollywood during this era? Unlike the computer industries themselves, postwar Hollywood remained notoriously hostile to women who were not in front of the camera. Would the film and television industries be willing to portray women as capable and technologically adept without denigrating them as unfeminine, incompetent or undesirable? The answer, of course, is no. Nor could Hollywood bring itself to imagine computer technologies during this era as offering emancipatory potentials for racial and ethnic minorities, although they appeared occasionally in secondary roles as the hapless operators of computers in the process of going haywire. In Hollywood's eyes, the "priestly" class that worried Nelson and others remained a white, privileged male elite and the technologies it controlled served to reinscribe existing social hierarchies in its favor.

Begin this path: Socially Normative Critique

1. Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970)
2. Desk Set (1957)
3. The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (1964–68) and Get Smart (1965–70)
4. The Patty Duke Show "The Genius" (1963)
5. Batman (1966-68)
6. How to Frame a Figg (1971)
7. Sex Kittens Go to College (1960)
8. Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine (1965)
9. Socially Normative Critique: Conclusion

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