Electric Dreams : Computers in American Culture / Ted Friedman.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Friedman, Ted.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Computers--History.

Computers.

Computers--Social aspects.

Computers and civilization.

Genre:

Electronic books.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (286 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

New York ; London : New York University Press, [2005]

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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 arg

Contents:

Introduction : the dialectic of technological determinism

Part I. Mainframe culture. Charles Babbage and the politics of computer memory

Ideologies of information processing: from analog to digital

Filming the "electronic brain"

Part II. The personal computer. The many creators of the personal computer

Apple's 1984

The rise of the simulation game

Part III. The interpersonal computer. Imagining cyberspace

Dot-com politics

Beyond Napster

Linux and utopia

Conclusion : cybertopia today.

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 235-255) and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9780814728420

0814728421

9780814728666

0814728669

OCLC:

780425886