“Did you know whom Aaron Swartz is?” asks digital-rights attorney Dylan Stack. He answers his very own concern: ” The pc activist whom committed committing committing committing suicide after an unrelenting campaign from federal prosecutors to imprison him. Inside the memory, i am trying to organize a class action against prosecutorial overcharging.”
Now, bear in mind, this is on a tv show—and perhaps maybe maybe not some sober-minded PBS documentary about Swartz. It absolutely wasn’t also cable news or a geek-centered sitcom like the top Bang Theory. This is, in reality, a sleek procedural that is legal on system tv: the great Wife, a CBS show about legal counsel, Alicia Florrick (played by Julianna Margulies), starting its 5th season this Sunday.
Though putatively concerning the legislation (and Florrick’s transactions along with her Eliot husband that is spitzer-like, the nice Wife happens to be revered among geeks, as well as for valid reason: it provides the deftest depiction of technology on television. In reality, it could be the most readily useful force for electronic literacy in pop tradition today.
Look at the episode stated earlier: It starts having a rape test by which a senior high school woman tweets angrily in regards to the football player accused of assaulting her. She actually is jailed for contempt, together with instance falters until—in an echo of this real-world Steubenville rape case—the online activist collective Anonymous leakages a mobile phone video clip showing the accused rapist laughing at rape jokes of a blow-up doll. Anonymous people show up in court, creating a spectacle. Meanwhile, Florrick and her team wrestle with a few concerns: Can faceless, anarchic activists that are online trusted? How can phonecams alter a criminal activity such as this, since released videos run as both proof and an act that is criminal on their own? What is the legal standing of the image that is viral?
The plot had been ripped through the headlines, nevertheless the Good Wife went deep to the weeds in thinking just exactly how technology transforms everyday activity. That is not the only instance.
Eike Schroter/Photofest: Due To Samsung
In www.bridesfinder.net/ a single episode, Florrick makes use of the transnational nature of Twitter to thwart Uk libel laws and regulations. An additional, the show exposes an energy-drink business that employs shills to create remarks on anorexia-glorifying “pro-Ana” sites. The wife that is good once sued a Google-like internet search engine for juking the positioning of a voice-recognition computer pc software business, in an episode en titled “Two Girls, One Code.” (most readily useful moment: The apparently senile, hard-of-hearing judge instantly reveals angry technology skillz. “An attribute-based link-analysis is perhaps not really a shut system,” he lectures in the defendant’s lawyer.)
One episode also mused Talmudically within the appropriate and meaning that is political of.
Whenever this fall is returned by the show, plotlines should include telepresence robots plus an episode motivated by Redditors’ bungled tries to recognize the Boston bombers. Shows and films, needless to say, have actually very long utilized electronic tools and techie that is real-life as plot points—but seldom with much nuance.
television USUALLY PORTRAYS TECH AS IMPLAUSIBLY SUPERPOWERED ALARMINGLY that is OR HAZARDOUS.
In many shows, technology is painted as either implausibly superpowered (“Wait—enhance that image!”) or alarmingly dangerous. Procedurals were specific offenders. On Law & Order, the world wide web is certainly caused by merely a shadowy spot where teenagers are lured for their death. On individual of great interest, federal government agencies utilize pervasive surveillance technology to anticipate malintent with pinpoint precision.
The Wife that is good avoids Manichaean trap. This really is most likely as a result of the known undeniable fact that the show’s creators and showrunners, husband-and-wife group Robert and Michelle King, are curious nerds. “I’m simply interested in how culture is changing through social media together with impact of Silicon Valley on nearly every part of life,” claims Robert King. Their objective is certainly not to produce a case that is polemical or against technology, he adds. “The show does not you will need to damn things, because I do not believe that’s truth. The improvements getting used in a totalitarian culture like Asia may also be used to prompt the Arab springtime. Social media had been managed extremely simplistically on television. We thought we’re able to allow it to be our personal.”
Most of exactly how technology plays within the real life is a concern of message acts—a normal topic for a good show about solicitors. “Words will be the tools on appropriate programs,” King says. Plus, the show’s authors’ space is full of tech-curious kinds; journalist Corinne Brinkerhoff conceived associated with the Bitcoin episode after becoming fascinated with the alternate cash system.
For technically advanced watchers, it is enjoyable to possess viewing that is sunday-night understands its way around Search Engine Optimization and crypto. It generates TV better. But we’d argue that the great Wife’s effect is much deeper than that. It possibly makes reality better.
Fictive depictions of technology are influential. television and movies have long shaped just just exactly how people that are everyday the world—and more crucial, the way they misunderstand it.
As an example, the parade of wicked hackers in Hollywood films look much more effective compared to truth. But politicians have actually taken care of immediately the film form of blackhat coders, passing laws and regulations that clamp down on also computer activity that is innocuous. The Reagan-era Congress ended up being therefore frightened by the cartoonish hacker exploits in War Games so it passed sweeping computer-crime regulations nevertheless utilized as a bludgeon today that is legal. Recently, the prosecutors of Bradley Manning invoked these tropes that are tired. They stated the usage basic Unix commands—and white-on-black, DOS-style displays—was inherently nefarious, because hey: Isn’t that exactly just how hackers look on TV? Within the ’30s we had “reefer madness” movies; this”hacker is called by the Electronic Frontier Foundation madness.”
This is exactly why the Wife that is good is a stream of much-needed air. I would ike to think we are able to evaluate social modification calmly and dispassionately, that people can map the contours of y our electronic globe by parsing trenchant nonfiction and maintaining up-to-date with the news headlines.
But we’re narrative animals. tales matter; fiction things. Want it or perhaps not, they may be where electronic literacy—and illiteracy—begins. If individuals are likely to seem sensible of exactly just how technology changes culture, we desperately require smart stories and tale-tellers that are smart.
The nice Wife is really a procedural that is perfectly entertaining however, if it manages to instruct people the definitions behind a technical culture, therefore much the greater.
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