| This dissertation is located at the intersection of popular culture and cybernetics as a site of inquiry about the reception of computer technologies and their incorporation into everyday life. It engages cinematic, journalistic, and televisual narrative strategies that are structured by the tropes of the hacker and of viral contamination. While these tropes generate narratives centered around epistemological crises they also reveal what is at stake in the process of gathering, processing, and disseminating knowledge. As some of these narratives are reorganized non-linearly, complex systems theory is my primary focus. Yet, complex systems theory in itself cannot establish a link between existing anxieties about new technologies and the historical legacy of older resistance models such as the feminist and civil rights movement. Hence, this study untangles the complex relations and far-reaching cultural implications of various oppositional discourses, practices, and conventions---which have undergone broad historical changes over the last fifteen years. |
