Think Piece: Meaning and Persuasion: The Personal Computer and Economic Education

In the last days of 1982, the corporate-funded business education nonprofit Junior Achievement (JA) began distributing 121 donated personal computers—Xerox 820s, Hewlett Packard HP-86s, and IBM personal computers—to classrooms in 25 cities across the United States.¹ The donated machines were part of JA’s new high school course, Applied Economics. The course curriculum had been designed with the goal of teaching economic principles, business skills, and the appreciation of private enterprise to high school students.² The personal computer, JA executives hoped, would draw student interest toward the course and its perspective on American economic life. The course, including its classroom lectures, in-class activities, computerized bookkeeping, and management simulation software, would present a vision of American economic life in which market forces organized the economy, with necessary but decidedly minimal interventions by organized labor or the state.

The research for my dissertation focused on the production of these kinds of corporate-sponsored “economic education” media: television documentaries, public service announcements, and school curricula that sponsors and producers hoped would instill an appreciation of private enterprise in the American public.³ Sponsored economic education media productions were particularly prevalent from the New Deal era through the late Cold War period.⁴ Sometimes, corporations directly sponsored and produced economic education materials. More often, however, nonprofit advocacy, outreach, or education groups acted as institutional intermediaries, taking corporate grants or sponsorships to fund media production. These media productions—ranging across diverse forms such as pamphlets, films, television programs, filmstrips, textbooks, and digital software—were efforts to maintain and buttress the social legitimacy of capitalism and private enterprise in the public imagination.

Many of the groups involved in economic education were interested in what personal computers could help them communicate to the public. The act of embracing computer technology could help an economic education group signal a forward-looking orientation. Furthermore, economic education groups were interested in software because it could represent complex ideas: from their perspective, software was communicative and therefore potentially persuasive.

Maintaining Meaning

Recent scholarship has emphasized the importance of the maintainers—thatis, the people who “keep ordinary existence going” by repairing and maintaining our technological systems.⁵ Technological systems, however, are not the only systems that require maintenance. Systems of cultural meaning—that is to say, ideologies—must also be carefully maintained to accommodate changing conditions and avoid ideological breakdowns that could shift the distribution of power, wealth, and perceived social legitimacy within a society. In other words, the advocacy groups, education nonprofits, and corporate sponsors involved in making economic education media were maintainers of a different sort. They used media in their efforts to repair and maintain ideologies, in the process framing a particular set of American capitalist institutional practices and social values as “ordinary existence.”

We can examine these maintenance efforts by exploring not only the traditional media such organizations produced, but also their turn to and deployment of computers. JA’s adoption of computing in the Applied Economics curriculum illustrates how this nonprofit business education group conceptualized personal computer hardware and software: as a means of drawing the attention of disengaged students toward an appreciation of free market perspectives, and as a means of aligning a learning-by-doing tradition with the rhythms and norms of the secondary school classroom.

This is not to suggest that there is something intrinsic or natural that links computing to capitalism in the abstract or to the many and varied ways Americans practice capitalism. Rather, the case provides one more example of the myriad ways computers were drawn into, and became modes of expression for, political and economic ideologies. Links drawn between capitalist ideology and computing include Thomas Streeter’s critique of Silicon Valley’s “two guys in a garage” mythos, for example, which draws out the romantic individualism embedded in 1980s personal computing lore. Similarly, Fred Turner’s unraveling of the 1990s cyber-elite’s countercultural roots helps illuminate the emergence of techno-libertarianism.⁶ Other works such as Eden Medina’s account of socialist computing visions in Allende’s Chile and Benjamin Peters’ chronicling of Soviet attempts to build a...