Technophobia: Video Games, Computer Hacks and Cybernetics

Abstract

There is a general anxiety in contemporary culture that circulates around the adoption of new technology. This paper identifies the intergenerational fears that have developed around computer-mediated culture in order to illuminate how the integration of the computer has become the site for concerns about the economic viability of the current middle class. Two types of fears are discussed: the fear of waste, where the new information economy may be missed by the next generation in their focus on new forms of pleasures through games; and the fear of knowledge, where the type of knowledge gained produces an out-of-control hacker subculture that cannot be surveilled or contained by an older generation. These fears of succession are most readily visible in male adolescent culture, (which has working class construction of pleasure with overly simplified militaristic norms) and the computer hacker culture (computer expertise in positive feedback loops that don't respond to social restraint).

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 13 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.