| This dissertation examines the literary, philosophical, and cultural implications of grounding an age on information. Drawing on the technical and popularized writings of Norbert Wiener and Claude Shannon, the founders of cybernetics and information science, respectively, and the critical thinking of Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger, and Michel Foucault, I demonstrate how the discourses of cybernetics, artificial intelligence, and the national-security-state emerge as linked attempts to contain the uncertainty and fragmentation of the modern age within a “black box” called information.; Commonly understood as the name for both the process of communication and that which is communicated, the term “information” has proven a convenient shorthand for describing the changes associated with a century of rapid innovation in the technologies of communication and the corresponding growth in the economic role of that which is communicated. Using information to describe the impact of advances in computers, international telecommunications, and the post-industrial economy tends to limit consideration of the nature and implications of these changes to these advances. Tracing the possibilities and limitations of the various uses of the term information in cultural as well as scientific discourses, I argue that what characterizes both information and the contemporary age is not these technological or economic shifts but rather the fundamental tension between uncertainty and control that lies at the heart of representational thinking.; Because film incorporates the very questions of fragmentation, technology, and the construction of continuity central to information into its apparatus, I ground my analysis of the resulting struggle for governance and security through extended critical readings of two films, Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1926) and James Cameron's The Terminator (1984). These films mark off the boundaries of the information age, allowing me to examine the international culture created by the technologies of instant communication and the economy of world markets after the Second World War from one end to the other. I use these readings to develop a framework for assessing the actual transformative potential of information and what is at stake in the current attempts by various governments, industries, and academic disciplines to contain and regulate it. |
