Electric Dreams : : Computers in American Culture / / Ted Friedman.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter New York University Press Backlist eBook-Package 2000-2013
• VerfasserIn: Friedman, Ted,
• Place / Publishing House: New York, NY : : New York University Press, , [2005]; ©2005
• Year of Publication: 2005
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource

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.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: The Dialectic of Technological Determinism -- Part I Mainframe Culture -- 1 Charles Babbage and the Politics of Computer Memory -- 2 Ideologies of Information Processing: From Analog to Digital -- 3 Filming the “Electronic Brain” -- Part II The Personal Computer -- 4 The Many Creators of the Personal Computer -- 5 Apple’s 1984 -- 6 The Rise of the Simulation Game -- Part III. The Interpersonal Computer -- 7 Imagining Cyberspace -- 8 Dot-com Politics -- 9 Beyond Napster -- 10 Linux and Utopia -- Conclusion: Cybertopia Today -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- About the Author