Learning to Love Computers Useful Cinema and the Mediation of American Computing, 1958–62

Abstract

Cinema has long been used to mediate new technologies as contentious as the atomic bomb, yet historians of technology have largely overlooked mediation processes. This article argues that media are integral to the historical definition, negotiation, and spread of new technologies by demonstrating useful cinema’s significance for the social shaping of mainframe computing. When the 1950s’ adoption of computers triggered a wave of automation anxiety among working Americans, powerful institutional actors turned to educational, industrial, and documentary films to reshape American public opinion. Films tailored by IBM, the U.S. Navy, and CBS helped quell crises from software labor shortages to the existential threat of pushbutton weapons. Once distributed among educational film channels, however, these films reached increasingly large audiences, spreading and generalizing computerization’s narrative inevitability. By tracing films instead of hardware, this article demonstrates the importance of the media-historical approach to studying the social shaping of technology.