Računalniki - ko se poročita industrijsko-vojaški kompleks in kontrakultura

| 21. September 2006 | | Jure

Zelo zanimiv članek o kulturnih spremembah v odnosu do računalnikov/informacijske tehnologije. Od orodja hladne vojne in birokracije ter državnega nadzora do nepogrešljivega elementa sanj digitalnih generacij.

Only thirty years earlier, computers had been the tools and emblems of the same unfeeling industrial-era social machine whose collapse they now seemed ready to bring about. In the winter of 1964, for instance, students marching for free speech at the University of California at Berkeley feared that America’s political leaders were treating them as if they were bits of abstract data. One after another, they took up blank computer cards, punched them through with new patterns of holes—”FSM” and “STRIKE”—and hung them around their necks. One student even pinned a sign to his chest that parroted the cards’ user instructions: “I am a UC student. Please do not fold, bend, spindle or mutilate me.” For the marchers of the Free Speech Movement, as for many other Americans throughout the 1960s, computers loomed as technologies of dehumanization, of centralized bureaucracy and the rationalization of social life, and, ultimately, of the Vietnam War. Yet, in the 1990s, the same machines that had served as the defining devices of cold-war technocracy emerged as the symbols of its transformation. Two decades after the end of the Vietnam War and the fading of the American counterculture, computers somehow seemed poised to bring to life the countercultural dream of empowered individualism, collaborative community, and spiritual communion. How did the cultural meaning of information technology shift so drastically?