Electric Dreams: Computers in American Culture

Janice Radway, Director, Literature Program, Duke University: “Both a persuasive genealogy of how computers have been ‘thought’ since their inception and a searching exploration of their function as tools for dreaming utopian dreams, Ted Friedman's book does a wonderful job of tracing the history and impact of the computer through its appearance in American popular culture. Not content simply to demystify our fascination with these machines, Friedman suggests that by understanding the anxieties and ambivalence they occasion, cultural studies might well be able to show how the computer figures a space where Americans try seriously to imagine and engage the future.”
Jonathan Sterne, author of The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction: “Electric Dreams is at once a synthetic history of the personal computer, a history of representations of the computer, and a treatise on how to think about computing as a cultural phenomenon. Friedman’s original analyses and clear style make the book a pleasure to read. It will appeal to anyone interested in learning about the deeper cultural currents that flow beneath today’s waves of so-called ‘new’ media.”...

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