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Electric Dreams

Computers in American Culture
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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.
AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: The Dialectic of Technological Determinism Part I Mainframe Culture1 Charles Babbage and the Politics of Computer Memory 2 Ideologies of Information Processing: From Analog to Digital3 Filming the "Electronic Brain" Part II The Personal Computer4 The Many Creators of the Personal Computer 5 Apple's 1984 6 The Rise of the Simulation Game Part III The Interpersonal Computer7 Imagining Cyberspace 8 Dot-com Politics 9 Beyond Napster 10 Linux and Utopia Conclusion: Cybertopia Today Notes BibliographyIndex About the Author
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