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SUMMARY:Garbage in\, garbage out? A history of representations of computer
 s in popular media - James Sumner (University of Manchester)
DTSTART:20170126T153000Z
DTEND:20170126T170000Z
UID:TALK70242@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Marta Halina
DESCRIPTION:A variety of recent scholarship has traced the development of 
 popular science through print media sources\, exploring how characterizati
 ons of scientific phenomena evolve through interactions between authors' a
 gendas\, audience responses\, and changes in publishing culture. Studies s
 o far have tended to focus on 19th-century cases\, seeking the origins of 
 the familiar boundaries of 'science in public'. Here I apply similar consi
 derations to an inescapably 20th-century phenomenon: the electronic digita
 l computer.\n\nThe vision of computers as profoundly new and world-changin
 g endured over a paradoxically long period\, from the mid-1940s to the 198
 0s\, in newspapers\, magazines and an ever-growing range of introductory b
 ooks. Although some authors harnessed the blank-slate rhetoric to revoluti
 onary social\, economic or educational manifestos\, the conceptual content
  of the literature overall was interestingly conservative\, returning repe
 atedly to a default stock of narratives\, justifications and analogies. So
 me of these representations originated in wider\, older discourses: fears 
 that computers would destroy white-collar jobs were an obvious reincarnati
 on of pre-digital tensions over mechanized deskilling. Others were conscio
 usly introduced to shape expectations: industry sources promoted awareness
  of the GIGO principle ('garbage in\, garbage out') to affirm the technolo
 gy as a neutral tool\, doing only and precisely what it was told. Still ot
 hers seem to have persisted by default without much underpinning intent: t
 he remorseless tendency to explain binary arithmetic\, to all audiences an
 d for all purposes\, endured for half a century. Ultimately\, I argue\, 'c
 omputing' in the popular imagination was only to a limited degree a produc
 t of its time.
LOCATION:Seminar Room 2\, Department of History and Philosophy of Science
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