Electric Dreams: Computers in American Culture

Electric Dreams: Computers in American Culture
ISBN-10
0814727395
ISBN-13
9780814727393
Series
Electric Dreams
Category
Political Science
Pages
268
Language
English
Published
2005-12
Publisher
NYU Press
Author
Ted Friedman

Description

Electric Dreams turns to the past to trace the cultural history of computers. Ted Friedman charts the struggles to define the meanings of these powerful machines over more than a century, from the failure of Charles Babbage’s “difference engine” in the nineteenth century to contemporary struggles over file swapping, open source software, and the future of online journalism. To reveal the hopes and fears inspired by computers, Electric Dreams examines a wide range of texts, including films, advertisements, novels, magazines, computer games, blogs, and even operating systems. Electric Dreams argues that the debates over computers are critically important because they are how Americans talk about the future. In a society that in so many ways has given up on imagining anything better than multinational capitalism, cyberculture offers room to dream of different kinds of tomorrow.

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