“Do you realize whom Aaron Swartz is?” asks lawyer that is digital-rights Stack. He answers their own concern: ” The computer activist whom committed committing committing suicide after an unrelenting campaign from federal prosecutors to imprison him. In the memory, i am trying to organize an action that is class prosecutorial overcharging.”

Now, consider, this is on a tv show—and not some sober-minded PBS documentary about Swartz. It had beenn’t also cable news or perhaps a sitcom that is geek-centered the top Bang Theory. It was, in reality, a sleek legal procedural drama on system television: the nice Wife, a CBS show about an attorney, Alicia Florrick (played by Julianna Margulies), starting its 5th period this Sunday.

Though putatively concerning the legislation (and Florrick’s transactions together with her Eliot husband that is spitzer-like, the nice Wife has grown to become revered among geeks, as well as valid reason: it provides the deftest depiction of technology on television. In reality, it may possibly be the mail order wife force that is best for electronic literacy in pop tradition now.

Think about the episode stated earlier: It starts having a rape trial for which a school that is high tweets angrily in regards to the football player accused of assaulting her. She actually is jailed for contempt, together with instance falters until—in an echo regarding the real-world Steubenville rape case—the activist that is online Anonymous leakages a cellular phone video clip showing the accused rapist laughing at rape jokes of a blow-up doll. Anonymous people reveal up in court, creating a spectacle. Meanwhile, Florrick and her team wrestle with a number of concerns: Can faceless, anarchic online activists be trusted? Just how do phonecams alter a criminal activity similar to this, since released videos run as both proof and an act that is criminal by themselves? What is the legal standing of the viral image?

The plot ended up being ripped through the headlines, nevertheless the Good Wife went deeply in to the weeds in pondering how technology transforms life that is everyday. That is not the only instance.

Eike Schroter/Photofest: Due To Samsung

In a single episode, Florrick makes use of the transnational nature of Twitter to thwart Uk libel guidelines. An additional, the show exposes an energy-drink business that employs shills to create feedback on anorexia-glorifying “pro-Ana” sites. The Good spouse lawyers once sued a Google-like internet search engine for juking the ratings of a voice-recognition pc software company, within an episode titled “Two Girls, One Code.” (most useful minute: The apparently senile, hard-of-hearing judge unexpectedly reveals angry technology skillz. “An attribute-based link-analysis is not just a shut system,” he lectures during the defendant’s lawyer.)

One episode also mused Talmudically on the appropriate and meaning that is political of.

Whenever the show comes back this autumn, plotlines should include telepresence robots and an episode encouraged by Redditors’ bungled tries to determine the Boston bombers. Television shows and films, needless to say, have actually very long utilized electronic tools and techie that is real-life as plot points—but seldom with much nuance.

television USUALLY PORTRAYS TECH AS IMPLAUSIBLY SUPERPOWERED ALARMINGLY that is OR HAZARDOUS.

Generally in most programs, technology is painted as either implausibly superpowered (“Wait—enhance that image!”) or alarmingly dangerous. Procedurals have now been offenders that are particular. The Internet is mostly just a shadowy place where teens are lured to their death on law & Order. On individual of great interest, federal federal federal government agencies utilize pervasive surveillance technology to anticipate malintent with pinpoint precision.

The Good Wife prevents this Manichaean trap. This is certainly most most likely because of the known undeniable fact that the show’s creators and showrunners, husband-and-wife group Robert and Michelle King, are curious nerds. “I’m simply fascinated with just exactly how culture is evolving through social network in addition to impact of Silicon Valley on virtually every element of life,” claims Robert King. Their objective isn’t to create a case that is polemical or against technology, he adds. “The show does not you will need to damn things, because I do not believe that’s truth. The advances getting used in a totalitarian culture like Asia may also be utilized to prompt the spring that is arab. Social network was managed really simplistically on television. We thought it could be made by us our personal.”

Most of exactly exactly how technology plays within the world that is real a question of message acts—a normal topic for a smart show about attorneys. “Words will be the tools on appropriate programs,” King says. Plus, the show’s authors’ space is filled up with tech-curious kinds; journalist Corinne Brinkerhoff conceived associated with Bitcoin episode after becoming fascinated with the money system that is alternative.

For theoretically advanced audiences, it is enjoyable to possess viewing that is sunday-night understands its method around Search Engine Optimization and crypto. It generates TV better. But I would argue that the nice Wife’s effect is much much deeper than that. It possibly makes reality better.

Fictive depictions of technology are influential. television and films have long shaped just just exactly how people comprehend the world—and more essential, the way they misunderstand it.

For instance, the parade of wicked hackers in Hollywood movies look much more effective compared to truth. But politicians have actually taken care of immediately the movie form of blackhat programmers, passing laws and regulations that clamp down on also computer activity that is innocuous. The Reagan-era Congress had been so frightened by the cartoonish hacker exploits in War Games it passed sweeping computer-crime legislation nevertheless utilized as a bludgeon today that is legal. Now, the prosecutors of Bradley Manning invoked these tired tropes. They stated making use of basic Unix commands—and white-on-black, DOS-style displays—was inherently nefarious, because hey: Isn’t that just exactly just how hackers look on TV? In the ’30s we had “reefer madness” films; this”hacker is called by the Electronic Frontier Foundation madness.”

That is why the Wife that is good is a blast of much-needed air. Let me think we could evaluate change that is social and dispassionately, we can map the contours of our electronic globe by parsing trenchant nonfiction and maintaining up-to-date with the news headlines.

But we are narrative creatures. Tales matter; fiction matters. Enjoy it or otherwise not, they truly are where electronic literacy—and illiteracy—begins. If folks are planning to add up of just just how technology changes society, we desperately require smart stories and smart tale-tellers.

The nice Wife is just a procedural that is perfectly entertaining however if it manages to instruct people the definitions behind a technical culture, therefore much the greater.