“Do you realize 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 an unrelenting campaign from federal prosecutors to imprison him. Inside the memory, i am trying to organize a class mail order brides action against prosecutorial overcharging.”
Now, bear in mind, it was on a tv show—and perhaps not some PBS that is sober-minded documentary Swartz. It absolutely wasn’t also cable news or even a sitcom that is geek-centered the major Bang Theory. It was, in reality, a sleek legal procedural drama on community tv: the great Wife, a CBS show about legal counsel, Alicia Florrick (played by Julianna Margulies), starting its fifth season this Sunday.
Though putatively in regards to the law (and Florrick’s transactions along with her Eliot Spitzer-like spouse), the great Wife is becoming revered among geeks, and for valid reason: it gives the deftest depiction of technology on television. In reality, it might be the force that is best for electronic literacy in pop tradition at this time.
Think about the episode mentioned previously: It starts having a rape test by which a school that is high tweets angrily concerning the football player accused of assaulting her. She actually is jailed for contempt, plus the instance falters until—in an echo of this real-world Steubenville rape case—the online activist collective Anonymous leaks a mobile phone movie showing the accused rapist laughing at rape jokes in regards to a blow-up doll. Anonymous people reveal up in court, creating a spectacle. Meanwhile, Florrick and her team wrestle with a few concerns: Can faceless, anarchic activists that are online trusted? Just how can phonecams alter a criminal activity similar to this, since released videos run as both proof and an act that is criminal on their own? What is the legal standing of the viral image?
The plot had been ripped through the headlines, however the Good Wife went deeply in to the weeds in thinking exactly just how technology transforms life that is everyday. That is not the example that is only.
Eike Schroter/Photofest: Due To Samsung
In one single episode, Florrick utilizes the transnational nature of Twitter to thwart libel that is british. An additional, the show exposes an energy-drink business that hires shills to create feedback on anorexia-glorifying “pro-Ana” sites. The Good spouse lawyers once sued a Google-like s.e. for juking the ranks of the voice-recognition computer software business, in a episode en en titled “Two Girls, One Code.” (most readily useful minute: The seemingly senile, hard-of-hearing judge unexpectedly reveals mad technology skillz. “an link-analysis that is attribute-based perhaps perhaps not a shut system,” he lectures in the defendant’s lawyer.)
One episode also mused Talmudically within the legal and meaning that is political of.
Whenever this fall is returned by the show, plotlines should include telepresence robots plus an episode encouraged by Redditors’ bungled tries to determine the Boston bombers. Television shows and films, needless to say, have actually very long utilized electronic tools and real-life techie activities as plot points—but seldom with much nuance.
television USUALLY PORTRAYS TECH AS IMPLAUSIBLY SUPERPOWERED OR ALARMINGLY HAZARDOUS.
Generally in most programs, technology is painted as either implausibly superpowered (“Wait—enhance that image!”) or alarmingly dangerous. Procedurals have now been offenders that are particular. The Internet is mostly just a shadowy place where teens are lured to their death on law & Order. On individual of great interest, federal federal government agencies utilize pervasive surveillance technology to anticipate malintent with pinpoint precision.
The Wife that is good avoids Manichaean trap. This can be most most most likely as a result of the proven fact that the show’s creators and showrunners, husband-and-wife group Robert and Michelle King, are curious nerds. “I’m simply interested in exactly how culture is evolving through social network therefore the impact of Silicon Valley on virtually every element of life,” claims Robert King. Their objective isn’t to produce a polemical instance for or against technology, he adds. “The show does not attempt to damn things, because I don’t genuinely believe that’s truth. The improvements being used in a totalitarian culture like Asia will also be utilized to prompt the spring that is arab. Social network had been managed really simplistically on television. We thought we’re able to ensure it is our very own.”
A lot of how technology plays into the world that is real a concern of message acts—a normal topic for a good show about solicitors. “Words would be the weapons on appropriate shows,” King says. Plus, the show’s authors’ room is full of tech-curious kinds; author Corinne Brinkerhoff conceived for the Bitcoin episode after becoming fascinated with the alternate cash system.
For theoretically advanced people, it is enjoyable to possess viewing that is sunday-night understands its method around Search Engine Optimization and crypto. It will make TV better. But I would argue that the nice Wife’s effect is much deeper than that. It possibly makes reality better.
Fictive depictions of technology are influential. television and films have long shaped just exactly exactly how people that are everyday the world—and more essential, the way they misunderstand it.
For instance, the parade of wicked hackers in Hollywood films look a lot more powerful compared to truth. But politicians have actually taken care of immediately the film form of blackhat programmers, passing guidelines that clamp down on also computer activity that is innocuous. The Reagan-era Congress had been so frightened by the cartoonish hacker exploits in War Games it passed sweeping computer-crime guidelines nevertheless used as a bludgeon today that is legal. Now, the prosecutors of Bradley Manning invoked these tropes that are tired. They stated the application of basic Unix commands—and white-on-black, DOS-style displays—was inherently nefarious, because hey: Isn’t that exactly exactly exactly how hackers look on TV? When you look at the ’30s we had “reefer madness” movies; the Electronic Frontier Foundation calls this “hacker madness.”
That is why the Wife that is good is a stream of much-needed air. I would ike to think we could evaluate social modification calmly and dispassionately, that people can map the contours of our electronic globe by parsing trenchant nonfiction and maintaining up-to-date with the news headlines.
But we are narrative creatures. Tales matter; fiction issues. Want it or perhaps not, they are where literacy—and that is digital. If folks are planning to add up of exactly exactly just how technology changes culture, we desperately require smart stories and smart tale-tellers.
The nice Wife is a procedural that is perfectly entertaining however if it manages to show individuals the definitions behind a technical culture, so much the greater.
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