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 them. 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 The Bomb. 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. 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

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