Interfacing with the Internet in Popular Cinema [Paperback]

The Internet is the most terrifying and most beautifully innovative invention of the twentieth century. Using film theory and close textual analysis, Tucker offers an explanation of the Internet and a brief history of its portrayal on film in order examine how it has shaped contemporary versions of self-identity, memory, and the human body.Introduction 1. The Cables Under, In, and Around Our Homes: 'The Net' as Viral Suburban Intruder 2. The Evolution of the Web Browser: The Global Village Outgrown 3. Avatar in the Uncanny Valley: The Na'vi and Us, The Machinic Audience 4. Hacking Against the Apocalypse: Tony Stark and the Remilitarized Internet 5. With a Great Data Plan Comes Great Responsibility: The Enmeshed Web 2.0 Internet User 6. Don't Shoot the (Instant) Messenger: The Efficient Virtual Body Learns 7. The Reel/Real Internet: Beyond Genre and the Often Vulnerable Virtual Family Conclusion

This is a lively and wide-ranging account of how cinema has engaged with the Internet age, and with how we have imagined ourselves and our interactions with digital technologies over the last three decades. - Lisa Purse, Associate Professor of Film, University of Reading, UK and author of Digital Imaging in Popular Cinema

Interfacing with the Internet in Popular Culture is a vibrant and erudite text that offers the first book-length study of how the Internet, and computers/computing more generally, have been represented in film - with a specific focus on cinema from the 1990s onwards. It offers a perspicacious analysis of how the language that we use to describe the Internet determines our understanding of it, while also engaging with a wide body of popular, but critically overlooked films, the deal with surveillance in the contemporary era, including Swordfish, Sneakers, and Enemy of the State. But this book is not just a timely analysis of films about or featuring the internet; through the provocative concept of the machinic audience, it also colCÉ