Interfacing With The Internet In Popular Cinema

The Internet is at once the most terrifying and most beautifully innovative invention of the twentieth century. Examining both science fiction and realistic dramas, Tucker closely engages with films like The Net, Hackers, and The Matrix trilogy alongside more recent works like Tron: Legacy, The Social Network, The Amazing Spiderman, and Avatar.

In combination with film theory and close textual analysis, he balances a historical understanding of the development of the Internet with an explanation of how the technology works in order to explore the ways in which this technology, both as a new medium and as represented in popular film, has shaped contemporary versions of self-identity, memory, and the human body.

Review: 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