****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
This is the first book I have read that "demystifies and recuperates" my own personal relationship with the computer, and my very visible and corporate relationship with it. Electric Dreams is designed in a way that communicates what needs to be known about the computer, particularly its ancestral descent. The many levels of historical context Friedman provides help to track the evolution of the computer by identifying its various transformations within the repetition of cultural conflicts that arose (and continue to surface) as a result of the its introduction and proliferation.Friedman also suggests thoughtful ways to assess this knowledge by using a cultural studies approach that overlaps into historiography, cinema studies, literary studies, and postmodernism. Equally important to my understanding is Friedman's focus on the representation process that is linked to four other processes that make up the "Circuit of Culture" loop- production, consumption, regulation, and identity. The focus on representation pushes me to think semiotically about the mimetic (or not) qualities of analog loads and digital loads and how these two very different ways of representing information are susceptible to lesser or greater possibilities for alternate representations.For example, the analog-based device seems to share a closer relationship to the thing it represents (sound to vinyl recording), whereas digital representation transforms the object into a collection of digits that is "other" than the thing represented. If the digital format, in this era's computer culture provides greater opportunities for consumers and producers to transform or reproduce the object that was digitized, what do we gain from such creative agency? And what kind of dystopia are we setting ourselves up for when the digitized re-arrangement of the referent can be executed so easily in the privacy (we think) of our own homes?Electric Dreams carves out a place where we can explore some of the questions we have about this computer culture we inhabit, and the contradictory processes we have identified during our hands-on relationships with the computer products that emerged (and continue to emerge) from this technology. Thanks to this book I feel better equipped to examine the cultural space that exists both inside and outside the capitalist processes of commodification and more capable of distinguishing between a computer culture that is good for us and one that is evil.
