[Air-l] Technology in Hollywood

[Laurel Ralston]

"The Net" - Sandra Bullock as a serious "net-head" whose identity gets
"erased."  Some of it is a bit fantastic, but a LOT of it hits home...

Laurie Ralston

-----Original Message-----
From: Bunz, Ulla K [mailto:ulla at ukans.edu]
Sent: Thursday, January 17, 2002 11:32 AM
To: 'air-l at aoir.org'
Subject: [Air-l] Technology in Hollywood


Later this semester, I'm planning on doing a "Technology in Hollywood" movie
session with my students in "Communication and New Technology." The purpose
is to show how popular movies have integrated technology into the everyday
lives of the movie characters - technology that maybe we have become
accustomed to, but that was brand new (and ultimately cool) only two, five,
or ten years ago.  

I am *not* planning on showing a whole movie. Instead, I will show multiple
short scenes, followed by in-class discussion. I have collected a few
examples (see below), and am looking for more. Can you help? I do not want
to include James Bond like movies, or science fiction/special effects type
movies. I don't want to show what someone has dreamt up as technology
possibly being able to do in some obscure scenario. I want to show "real"
scenes with everyday technology. Also, the movies don't have to be Hollywood
movies, but they should be fairly familiar to US undergraduates, because
their understanding will be greater that way.

Thanks for suggestions directly to ulla at ku.edu. I will post a summary to the
entire list.
ulla

Examples:
- "Office Space" - any of the fax machine scenes; the dramatic set-up of
installing a virus on a computer, which actually only consists of copying a
file from a floppy disk
- "Pretty Woman" - the very brief scene when Julia Roberts goes shopping in
Beverly Hills and a father and son drive by in a car, holding big fat cell
phones, and being very proud of them
- "Bowfinger" - the scene where Steve Martin is trying to impress someone,
and since he doesn't own a cell phone, he just ripped off a regular phone,
and while he pretends to talk on it, the cord dangles in the air
- "Topsy Turvey" - the scene where the phone is introduced as a new
technology, and people scream into the receivers to hear each other, upon
which an elderly gentleman remarks one might as well just open the window
and scream out of that
- "Jumping Jack Flash" - one of the scenes in which Whoopi Goldberg "chats"
on her computer (with blue and red underlain lines) with the supposedly lost
spy Peter
 

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