Computer technology changes at lightning-fast speed. So it's no surprise that the way computers are depicted on the silver screen has evolved rapidly in recent years.
"For the generation coming up, the computer is about as exciting as the telephone," says Dale Bradley, a communications professor at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ont., who has written on cyber-movies such as Robocop.
"People are so familiar with these things that if you're going to make computing the centre of a film, you're going to have to address something more than simply privacy issues or cyber-stalking."
The computer screen has a rich pedigree on the silver screen, often crossing over into science fiction and futuristic film genres. How it has been displayed has reflected the anxieties and interests of the time.
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In the late 1960s and early 1970s, characters like Hal, the supercomputer in 2001: A Space Odyssey, stood in for our anxieties about Big Brother and whether we were handing over too much responsibility to machines.
In the 1980s, War Games — featuring Matthew Broderick as a hacker who almost starts the Third World War — and Tron tapped into the growing fascination with computers and video games as they moved into the home.
In the 1990s, Hollywood explored the fears of interconnectedness with The Net, where Sandra Bullock almost has her life turned upside down by hackers — but also relationships in the light-hearted romance movie You've Got Mail.
In the new century films exploring the implications of computers have become more complex. Technology is omnipresent in the message of movies like the techno-crime-thriller Minority Report or TV shows like the terrorist-busting 24 and the whodunit CSI series.
"The important theme being shown is that in order to make things happen you cannot unplug. We have to plug in, be intimately implicated in digital culture to make a difference," says Sidney Eve Matrix, a film studies professor at Queen's University in Kingston, Ont.
"Technological skill is rewarded with empowerment."
Shows like 24, set to the tempo of flying squads of techno-whizzes uploading, downloading and interfacing crucial data, also serve to assuage western anxieties in the post-Sept. 11 era.
"It's the notion that you need a computer virtuoso working for you in order to be able to get at all the information that's out there and stay ahead in this vital race against the enemy," says Bill Beard, a film studies professor at the University of Alberta.
"You could see that as a mirror of the United States trying to combat terrorism with technology and how it is meant to give us a sense that technology may yet save us."
But it is perhaps Hollywood's seminal cyber-movie, The Matrix — in which Keanu Reeves learns that human existence is merely a computer program designed by life-sucking machines — along with Pleasantville and The Truman Show that warns our saviour may also be our enslaver, adds Beard.
"They demonstrate an anxiety that we are surrounded by so much information, that our concept of the world is so open to manipulation, that the world we are living in really isn't authentic," said Beard.
People, he added, have traditionally gained their understanding of human culture by talking and interacting with others, but now are increasingly learning it by sitting alone and being fed bits and bytes via Facebook, blog sites and YouTube.
"There's a whole different kind of society going on there, which I just continue to find scary in some way, because you are then not very far from The Matrix," said Beard.
"You're stuffed into a tube somewhere with these things providing nutrient for you and you're watching this show all the time."
"Things have become more like that, [not] less."
