“Do you realize who Aaron Swartz is?” asks digital-rights attorney Dylan Stack. He answers his or her own concern: ” The pc activist whom committed suicide after an unrelenting campaign from federal prosecutors to imprison him. In the memory, i am trying to organize an action that is class prosecutorial overcharging.”
Now, remember, it was for a tv show—and perhaps not some sober-minded PBS documentary about Swartz. It absolutely wasn’t also cable news or even a geek-centered sitcom like the top Bang Theory. It was, in reality, a sleek legal procedural drama on community tv: the great Wife, a CBS show about an attorney, Alicia Florrick (played by Julianna Margulies), starting its 5th period this Sunday.
Though putatively concerning the legislation (and Florrick’s dealings along with her Eliot husband that is spitzer-like, the nice Wife is actually revered among geeks, as well as valid reason: it includes the deftest depiction of technology on television. In reality, it might be the most readily useful force for electronic literacy in pop tradition today.
Think about the episode stated earlier: It starts by having a rape test by which a school that is high tweets angrily concerning the football player accused of assaulting her. She is jailed for contempt, plus the instance falters until—in an echo regarding the real-world Steubenville rape case—the activist that is online 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, 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 similar to this, since released videos run as both proof and a unlawful work in themselves? What is the legal standing of the image that is viral?
The plot had been ripped through the headlines, however the Good Wife went deep to the weeds in thinking exactly how technology transforms everyday activity. That isn’t the only instance.
Eike Schroter/Photofest: Due To Samsung
In a single episode, Florrick makes use of the transnational nature of Twitter to thwart libel that is british. An additional, the show reveals an energy-drink business that employs shills to publish responses on anorexia-glorifying “pro-Ana” sites. The Good spouse lawyers once sued a Google-like internet search engine for juking the positioning of a voice-recognition pc computer software company, in a episode en en titled “Two Girls, One Code.” (most readily useful minute: The apparently senile, hard-of-hearing judge abruptly reveals mad technology skillz. “An attribute-based link-analysis is perhaps not just a shut system,” he lectures in the defendant’s lawyer.)
One episode also mused Talmudically on the appropriate and political meaning of Bitcoin.
Whenever the show comes back this autumn, plotlines includes telepresence robots as well as an episode prompted by Redditors’ bungled tries to recognize the Boston bombers. Shows and films, needless to say, have traditionally utilized electronic tools and techie that is real-life as plot points—but rarely with much nuance.
television FREQUENTLY PORTRAYS TECH AS IMPLAUSIBLY SUPERPOWERED ALARMINGLY that is OR DANGEROUS.
Generally in most 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 mostly only a shadowy spot where teenagers are lured with their death. On individual of great interest, federal government agencies utilize pervasive surveillance technology to predict malintent with pinpoint precision.
The Good Wife prevents this Manichaean trap. This really is most most likely because of the 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 just how society is changing through social network as well as the impact of Silicon Valley on virtually every element of life,” states Robert King. Their objective just isn’t to create a case that is where can i find a wife 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 will also be utilized to prompt the spring that is arab. Social media had been managed really simplistically on television. We thought it could be made by us our very own.”
Most of exactly how technology plays into the world that is real a concern of message acts—a normal topic for an intelligent show about attorneys. “Words will be the tools on appropriate programs,” King says. Plus, the show’s authors’ space is filled up with tech-curious kinds; author Corinne Brinkerhoff conceived associated with the Bitcoin episode after becoming fascinated with the money system that is alternative.
For technically advanced audiences, it really is enjoyable to own Sunday-night watching that understands its means around Search Engine Optimization and crypto. It will make TV better. But I would argue that the great 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 long shaped just exactly how people that are everyday the world—and more crucial, 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 version of blackhat programmers, passing rules 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 laws and regulations still utilized as a bludgeon today that is legal. Now, the prosecutors of Bradley Manning invoked these tropes that are tired. They stated making use of basic Unix commands—and white-on-black, DOS-style displays—was inherently nefarious, because hey: Isn’t that exactly 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 stream of much-needed air. Let me think we could evaluate social modification calmly and dispassionately, we can map the contours of y our electronic globe by parsing trenchant nonfiction and maintaining up to date with the headlines.
But we are narrative animals. Tales matter; fiction things. Enjoy it or perhaps not, they truly are where literacy—and that is digital. If individuals are likely to seem sensible of just just how technology changes culture, we desperately require smart stories and tale-tellers that are smart.
The nice Wife is just a perfectly entertaining procedural, however if it manages to show people the definitions behind a technical culture, therefore much the higher.