"The Trouble With Machines Is People." The Computer as Icon in Post-War America: 1946-1970.

Abstract

This dissertation examines the changing interface between media culture and computer technology from 1946 to 1970 as a reflection of post-war and cold war anxieties about the future of American individualism and masculinity. It is an interdisciplinary study with a methodological and theoretical grounding in cultural studies, history, technology studies and media studies. Through a close reading of print and visual media artifacts (including films), along with oral history accounts of people who helped introduce computer technology to a broad national audience, I focus on how the images and metaphors deployed to create a concrete idea of computers in the minds of consumers served to reinforce traditional national narratives concerning masculinity, American exceptionalism, power, and class privilege. During a period when computer consumption was restricted to the military and corporate industry, rhetorical strategies used to describe computers as artifacts involved associations with things and ideas already common knowledge to readers and viewers. Chapter One focuses on the initial framing of computer technology and the introduction of metaphors of intelligence during the American presidential election of 1952. Chapter Two chronicles the development of chess playing computer programs and the link between computers and Cold War totalitarianism. Chapter Three explores notions of masculinity and femininity projected upon computers in American cinema and television of the 1950’s and 1960’s. Chapter Four discusses how the metaphorical associations of the 1950’s and their successful conflation of tradition, nature, and technology, were complicated -- and to some extent, contested --by the student movements of the 1960’s that sought to redefine ideas of culture, class, and gender through acts of public protest while recasting the computer as an icon of a corrupt and failing state.