Silicon Perceptions

Our personal conception of computers can be heavily influenced by the film industry. The ways in which computers are portrayed in movies can be factual or fictional and can be so powerful and intriguing that the movies inspire people to turn fictional portrayals into factual machines. Turkle’s question “What are we thinking about when we think about computers?” is often answered by the film industry by the theme of Big Brother (Turkle 47). Orwell introduced the idea of Big Brother in his novel 1984, where Big Brother, the government, watched everything. The film industry often plays on the idea of Big Brother and the increased likelihood of it through ever more sophisticated technology. The 1998 film Enemy of the State plays upon the idea of Big Brother and their use of powerful computers to try and destroy someone’s life.

The premise behind Enemy of the State lies in computers and computer technology that is extremely powerful and in the hands of corrupt government stooges. The main character of the movie is a successful lawyer that is unknowingly given evidence of a government murder, committed by the aforementioned government stooges, and because of this they try to get the evidence back by any means necessary. Throughout the movie, computers and computer technologies are used to track and listen and to the main character and to also alter whom he is in every database existing, destroying his way of life in just a few keystrokes. Still naive to the evidence he possesses, he struggles to comprehend why he can’t use his credit cards to get money from the bank. He receives help from a former government agent who helps him struggle to survive and discover what the antagonists are after, the movie ends creatively in a mob vs. government stooges shoot out.

Enemy of the State puts forth the idea that computers are what really runs this world and that people with enough power over these computers could destroy people’s way of life with very little effort. The movie also demonstrates some of the powerful computer technologies that encompass the surveillance world and their ability to watch and track and become Big Brother.

The film industry advanced the power of Big Brother in the film The Matrix. In this movie Big Brother is no longer a watchful government but a race of intelligent machines that was created by man. These machines became belligerent with their creators and war ensued. Thinking of the machine’s dependency on solar energy the humans used nuclear weapons to bring about a nuclear winter, hoping they would simply die. Their intelligence prevailed and they sought out the human body as a source of energy. To keep the mind occupied, while the humans were cultivated, they created an artificial world that was perceived by the minds of the captive humans as our world today. This artificial world was known as the Matrix to the free humans that live in cities under the surface of the Earth. With the Matrix the power of Big Brother over those living within has grown from controlling the world to creating it.

The ways computers are portrayed in both movies are of an evil and sinister power made worse by some form of corruption. This trend of the computers inherent evilness seems to grow as we build more powerful and more humanlike computers and software; it seems to play upon a fear that our own human brilliance will destroy us.

Both movies present the fact that computers have become part of our lives and therefore part of us, so our perceptions of computers has shifted from what a computer is to what a computer is not. Turkle sites that “people are more likely to distinguish themselves from machines by invoking biology” and that “Our bodies and our DNA are becoming our new lines in the sand” which illustrates that we truly are defining what a computer is not, possibly because of how computers are portrayed in some films (Turkle 148). It seems that when we think of computers we think of what they can do for us and what they can do to us, which makes us inherently indifferent towards them.

The ideas Turkle puts forth on artificial life and the ensuing artificial intelligence definitely outline how humans interact with computers. The philosophical threat that is the result of artificial life and its potential “human-like intelligent behavior” could be experienced because it shakes our foundations of intellectual superiority (Turkle 153). The conception that one day computers could displace humans, the fear that is played on The Matrix, definitely contributes to the natural discrepancy we use in interacting with and creating computers.