“Did you know whom Aaron Swartz is?” asks lawyer that is digital-rights Stack. He answers his or her own concern: ” The pc activist whom committed committing committing suicide after a campaign that is unrelenting federal prosecutors to imprison him. Inside the memory, i am trying to organize a class action against prosecutorial overcharging.”
Now, bear in mind, it was for a tv show—and perhaps maybe not some sober-minded PBS documentary about Swartz. It had beenn’t also cable news or perhaps a sitcom that is geek-centered The Big Bang Theory. It was, in reality, a sleek legal procedural drama on system tv: the nice Wife, a CBS show about an attorney, Alicia Florrick (played by Julianna Margulies), starting its 5th period this Sunday.
Though putatively in regards to the legislation (and Florrick’s transactions along with her Eliot Spitzer-like spouse), the great Wife is actually revered among geeks, as well as for valid reason: it provides the deftest depiction of technology on television. In reality, it may possibly be the force that is best for electronic literacy in pop tradition at this time.
Look at the episode mentioned previously: It starts by having a rape test by which a senior high school woman tweets angrily in regards to the football player accused of assaulting her. She is jailed for contempt, additionally the instance falters until—in an echo regarding the real-world Steubenville rape case—the online activist collective Anonymous leakages a cellular phone movie showing the accused rapist laughing at rape jokes about a blow-up doll. Anonymous people reveal up in court, producing a spectacle. Meanwhile, Florrick and her team wrestle with a number of concerns: Can faceless, anarchic online activists be trusted? Just how do phonecams alter a crime similar to this, since leaked videos run as both proof and a unlawful work in by themselves? What is the legal standing of a image that is viral?
The plot ended up being ripped through the headlines, nevertheless the Good Wife went deeply to the weeds in thinking exactly just how technology transforms everyday activity. That is not the example that is only.
Eike Schroter/Photofest: Due To Samsung
In a single episode, Florrick makes use of the transnational nature of Twitter to thwart Uk libel rules. An additional, the show reveals an energy-drink business that employs shills to create remarks on anorexia-glorifying “pro-Ana” sites. The Good spouse lawyers once sued a Google-like s.e. for juking the ratings of the voice-recognition computer software business, within an episode titled “Two Girls, One Code.” (most useful minute: The apparently senile, hard-of-hearing judge suddenly reveals mad technology skillz. “an link-analysis that is attribute-based maybe not just a shut system,” he lectures during the defendant’s lawyer.)
One episode also mused Talmudically on the appropriate and governmental meaning of Bitcoin.
Whenever the show comes back this autumn, plotlines should include telepresence robots and an episode influenced by Redditors’ bungled tries to recognize the Boston bombers. Television shows and films, needless to say, have actually very long used electronic tools and real-life techie activities as plot points—but rarely with much nuance.
television FREQUENTLY PORTRAYS TECH AS IMPLAUSIBLY SUPERPOWERED ALARMINGLY that is OR HAZARDOUS.
In many programs, technology is painted as either implausibly superpowered (“Wait—enhance that image!”) or alarmingly dangerous. Procedurals have already been specific offenders. On legislation & Order, the world wide web is mainly merely a shadowy spot where teenagers are lured for their death. On individual of great interest, federal federal government agencies use pervasive surveillance technology to anticipate malintent with pinpoint accuracy.
The Wife that is good avoids Manichaean trap. That is most likely because of the undeniable fact that the show’s creators and showrunners, husband-and-wife group Robert and Michelle King, are inquisitive nerds. “I’m simply interested in exactly how culture is evolving through social media while the 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 make an effort to damn things, because I do not genuinely believe that’s reality. The improvements getting used in a totalitarian culture like Asia will also be utilized to prompt the Arab springtime. Social network had been handled extremely simplistically on television. We thought we’re able to ensure it is our very own.”
Most of exactly how technology plays when you look at the real-world is a concern of message acts—a normal topic for an intelligent show about solicitors. “Words will be the mail order brides tools on legal programs,” King says. Plus, the show’s article writers’ space is full of tech-curious kinds; journalist Corinne Brinkerhoff conceived regarding the Bitcoin episode after becoming interested in the alternate cash system.
For theoretically advanced audiences, it is enjoyable to own Sunday-night watching that understands its method around Search Engine Optimization and crypto. It generates TV better. But I’d argue that the nice Wife’s effect is much much much deeper than that. It possibly makes reality better.
Fictive depictions of technology are influential. television and films have traditionally shaped exactly just how people comprehend the world—and more essential, the way they misunderstand it.
For instance, the parade of wicked hackers in Hollywood films look more effective compared to truth. But politicians have actually taken care of immediately the film type of blackhat programmers, passing guidelines that clamp down on also innocuous computer task. The Reagan-era Congress had been therefore frightened by the cartoonish hacker exploits in War Games so it passed sweeping computer-crime rules nevertheless utilized as a appropriate bludgeon today. Now, the prosecutors of Bradley Manning invoked these tropes that are tired. They stated the employment of basic Unix commands—and white-on-black, DOS-style displays—was inherently nefarious, because hey: Isn’t that just just how hackers look on TV? Within the ’30s we had “reefer madness” films; the Electronic Frontier Foundation calls this “hacker madness.”
That is why the nice Wife is such a blast of much-needed air. I would ike to think we could assess social change calmly and dispassionately, that people can map the contours of y our digital globe by parsing trenchant nonfiction and maintaining up to date with the news headlines.
But we are narrative animals. Tales matter; fiction things. Want it or perhaps not, they are where electronic literacy—and illiteracy—begins. If folks are likely to seem sensible of exactly just exactly how technology changes culture, we desperately require smart tales and tale-tellers that are smart.
The nice Wife is really a procedural that is perfectly entertaining however, if it manages to instruct individuals the definitions behind a technical culture, therefore much the higher.
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