User:Dave Young/RRW 1.1/Essay outline
Outline
For this essay I would like to explore examples of political paranoia with relation to computer-technologies, and the resulting systems implemented to control such technologies. In the days of the Californian Ideology and the counter-cultural dream of a networked utopia, technology also featured heavily in the mainstream American media in news stories detailing political conspiracies, espionage, the Cold War, and the ever-present threat of nuclear war. American cinema of the era portrayed simple tape recorders and telephones as sinister objects not to be trusted – films such as Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation (1974) explored obsession and paranoia with relation to technological surveillance just as The Watergate scandal was being featured in the press. I am interested in investigating how these political crises led to the introduction of “future-proofing” control-systems into network-culture, and as a result created a very different online atmosphere to the one originally imagined by the Californian Ideologists.
Bibliography
- Rossiter, Ned - Organized Networks: Media Theory, Creative Labour, New Institutions [from NM Office Lib]
- Harkin, James - Cyburbia (2009) (Ch. The Network Effect and Peer Pressure)
- Poster, Mark and Savat, David (Editors) - Deleuze and New Technology (2009)
- Chun, W.H.K - Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fibre-Optics (2005)
- Hofstadter, Richard - The Paranoid Style in American Politics (Nov 1964) Harper's Magazine, pp77-86
- Greenberg, David - The Obama Haters - We still don't understand how fringe conservatism went mainstream (2009)
- Barbrook, Richard and Cameron, Andy - The Californian Ideology (1995)
Filmography
- Ford Coppola, Francis - The Conversation (1974)
- Frankenheimer, John - The Manchurian Candidate (1962)
- Pakula, Alan J - All the President's Men (1976)
- Clooney, George - Goodnight and Goodluck (2005)
- Curtis, Adam - All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (2011)
- Ronson, Jon - Esc and Ctrl (2011) - documentary series produced for The Guardian