Interfacing with the Internet in Popular Cinema

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xi

   PDF

2. Introduction: The Robot Historian and the Internet

   • Aaron Tucker

   Pages 1-26

3. The Cables under, in, and around Our Homes: “The Net” as Viral Suburban Intruder

   • Aaron Tucker

   Pages 27-48

4. The Evolution of the Web Browser: The Global Village Outgrown

   • Aaron Tucker

   Pages 49-71

5. Avatar in the Uncanny Valley: The Na’vi and Us, the Machinic Audience

   • Aaron Tucker

   Pages 73-103

6. Hacking against the Apocalypse: Tony Stark and the Remilitarized Internet

   • Aaron Tucker

   Pages 105-133

7. With a Great Data Plan Comes Great Responsibility: The Enmeshed Web 2.0 Internet User

   • Aaron Tucker

   Pages 135-161

8. Don’t Shoot the (Instant) Messenger: The Efficient Virtual Body Learns

   • Aaron Tucker

   Pages 163-189

9. The Reel/Real Internet: Beyond Genre and the Often Vulnerable Virtual Family

   • Aaron Tucker

   Pages 191-217

10. Conclusion

    • Aaron Tucker

    Pages 219-222

11. Back Matter

    Pages 223-254

    PDF

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.

• Internet
• digital
• history
• film
• movies
• contemporary
• interface
• web browser
• virtual
• virtual reality
• avatar
• cyborg
• posthuman
• postbiological
• digital effects
• cinema
• ontology

"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 considers how we view films today, while simultaneously offering an exciting framework through which we can understand Internet culture more widely." - William Brown, Senior Lecturer in Film, University of Roehampton, UK and author of Supercinema: Film-Philosophy for the Digital Age

Aaron Tucker is Sessional Faculty in the Department of English at Ryerson University, Canada.

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