Electric Dreams: Computers in American Culture (review)

This engaging but ultimately unsatisfying book examines the "utopian sphere"—a public forum in which alternative futures can be imagined and debated—that arose in response to computing innovations, ranging from Charles Babbage's Difference Engine to web logs. It is of interest, writes Ted Friedman, because it is "one of the few forums within the contemporary public sphere where idealized versions of the future can be elaborated without dismissal" (p. 4). Friedman traces the utopian sphere's vitality and legitimacy to technological determinism, which can be politically incapacitating, as Friedman concedes; still, it also creates space, he suggests, for imagining different outcomes, which add up to a series of "conflicted visions of the future in computer culture" (p. 15). Scholars take delight in debunking these visions, but Friedman believes that technological utopianism has inspired progressive reform. If the utopian sphere can be rescued from its own oversimplifications—specifically, by revealing consistent "cross-sections of cultural conflicts and tensions" (p. 11)—the progressive-reform agenda might be clarified and aided.

Electric Dreams presents a survey of some of these visions as they are expressed in films, computer programs, and television shows as well as newspaper articles, novels, and advertisements. Although it provides useful illustrations of cyberutopian visions, they rarely break new ground—and, disappointingly, there is little discussion of how such visions could help to frame new progressive agendas. For example, Friedman describes "electronic folk culture," a contestational movement in which artists employ copyrighted materials and "rework them into collages of meta-cultural commentary." Expressly conceptualized as a protest against the legal system's increasing conflation of intellectual and real property, electronic folk culture points the way, Friedman suggests, toward a "fully democratized mass culture" in which the raw material of creativity—existing creative works—is fully available for combination and resynthesis (pp. 196–97). Still, Friedman seems content merely to note the existence of electronic folk culture and its contestational qualities, as numerous authors have already done. There is no discussion of how its products, let alone its vision of "universal access to [one's] cultural inheritance" (p. 197), can possibly survive the American legal system's recent and pervasive conflation of real and intellectual property, the development of digital content management systems, and draconian laws that mandate federal sanctions for the mere act of circumventing such systems.

Despite its flaws, Electric Dreams provides a valuable survey of cultural responses to computerization, and it could be useful in undergraduate courses on computing and culture. Still, historians of technology will no doubt find themselves uncomfortable with the cultural studies approach. Friedman does not attempt to survey the full range of cyberutopian responses to key technological developments. His discussion is based on a "careful selection" of sources, but there is no clear indication of just how, or why, this selection was made. The sources discussed are interesting, admittedly, but one wonders what we could learn from examining the uninteresting ones.

Furthermore, it is open to question whether the limited range of sources Friedman consults are adequate to describe the range of cyberutopian visions. As he himself observes in an interesting chapter on personal computing, these visions often found expression in specific technological designs, as evidenced by publicly available texts. But some of these visions (including some of the more "interesting" ones) were never described in publicly available media in a way that provides any hint of what the designers were actually thinking. To be sure, Friedman never set out to describe the range of cyberutopian visions comprehensively; the goal, rather, was to elucidate the recurrent patterns of cultural conflict concerning technological futures—and, ultimately, to point the way to progressive reform. But there is no concluding chapter that pulls these patterns together in any way, let alone one that could chart the way forward; instead, we are told, "Resistance is never futile...