The good Wife Is the Most Tech-Savvy Show on TV from Anonymous to Bitcoin

«Do you realize whom Aaron Swartz is?» asks lawyer that is digital-rights Stack. He answers their own concern: » The pc activist whom committed committing suicide after a campaign that is unrelenting federal prosecutors to imprison him. In their memory, i am wanting to organize a class action against prosecutorial overcharging.»

Now, consider, it was for a tv show—and maybe maybe not some PBS that is sober-minded documentary Swartz. It had beenn’t also cable news or even a geek-centered sitcom like the top Bang Theory. This is, in reality, a sleek legal procedural drama on system tv: the great 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 with her Eliot husband that is spitzer-like, the nice Wife has grown to become revered among geeks, as well as for valid reason: it gives the deftest depiction of technology on television. In reality, it might be the force that is best for electronic literacy in pop tradition at this time.

Look at the episode mentioned previously: It starts with a rape test by which a senior high school woman tweets angrily concerning the football player accused of assaulting her. She actually is jailed for contempt, plus the instance falters until—in an echo associated with real-world Steubenville rape case—the activist that is online Anonymous leakages a cellular phone movie showing the accused rapist laughing at rape jokes about a blow-up doll. Anonymous people reveal up in court, making a spectacle. Meanwhile, Florrick and her team wrestle with a few concerns: Can faceless, anarchic online activists be trusted? Just how do phonecams alter a crime such as this, since released videos run as both proof and a unlawful act in on their own? What is the legal standing of a viral image?

The plot had been ripped through the headlines, nevertheless the Good Wife went deeply to the weeds in thinking exactly how technology transforms life that is everyday. That isn’t the example that is only.

Eike Schroter/Photofest: Due To Samsung

In a single episode, Florrick utilizes the transnational nature of Twitter to thwart libel that is british. An additional, the show reveals an energy-drink business that employs shills to publish commentary on anorexia-glorifying «pro-Ana» sites. The wife that is good once sued a Google-like internet search engine for juking the positions of a voice-recognition pc pc software business, within an episode en en en titled «Two Girls, One Code.» (most readily useful minute: The apparently senile, hard-of-hearing judge abruptly reveals angry tech skillz. «an link-analysis that is attribute-based perhaps not a closed system,» he lectures during the defendant’s attorney.)

One episode also mused Talmudically within the appropriate and political meaning of Bitcoin.

Whenever this fall is returned by the show, plotlines should include telepresence robots as well as an episode encouraged by Redditors’ bungled tries to recognize the Boston bombers. Television shows and films, needless to say, have traditionally utilized electronic tools and real-life techie activities as plot points—but seldom with much nuance.

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

In many programs, technology is painted as either implausibly superpowered («Wait—enhance that image!») or alarmingly dangerous. Procedurals have already been specific offenders. On legislation & Order, the online world is mainly only a shadowy spot where teenagers are lured with their death. On individual of great interest, federal federal government agencies utilize pervasive surveillance technology to anticipate malintent with pinpoint precision.

The Good Wife prevents this Manichaean trap. This might be most likely as a result of known proven fact that the show’s creators and showrunners, husband-and-wife group Robert and Michelle King, are curious nerds. «I’m simply interested in just how culture is evolving through social network therefore the impact of Silicon Valley on nearly every element of life,» states Robert King. Their objective is find-bride certainly not to help make a case that is polemical or against technology, he adds. «The show does not make an effort to damn things, because I do not genuinely believe that’s reality. The improvements getting used in a totalitarian society like Asia may also be utilized to prompt the Arab springtime. Social network was managed really simplistically on television. We thought we’re able to ensure it is our very own.»

Most of exactly exactly how technology plays within the real life is a concern of message acts—a normal topic for a good show about solicitors. «Words would be the tools on legal programs,» King says. Plus, the show’s authors’ space is filled up with tech-curious kinds; author Corinne Brinkerhoff conceived associated with the Bitcoin episode after becoming interested in the money system that is alternative.

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

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

For instance, the parade of wicked hackers in Hollywood films look a lot more effective compared to truth. But politicians have actually responded to the film type of blackhat programmers, passing laws and regulations that clamp down on also computer activity that is innocuous. The Reagan-era Congress ended up being therefore frightened by the cartoonish hacker exploits in War Games so it passed sweeping computer-crime laws and regulations still utilized as a legal bludgeon today. Recently, the prosecutors of Bradley Manning invoked these tired tropes. They said the employment of basic Unix commands—and white-on-black, DOS-style displays—was inherently nefarious, because hey: Isn’t that exactly exactly how hackers look on TV? Into 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 oxygen. I would ike to think we could evaluate social modification calmly and dispassionately, that people 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 animals. Tales matter; fiction things. Enjoy it or perhaps not, they are where electronic literacy—and illiteracy—begins. If folks are likely to seem sensible of exactly exactly just how technology changes culture, we desperately require smart tales and tale-tellers that are smart.

The great Wife is really a perfectly entertaining procedural, however, if it manages to instruct individuals the definitions behind a technical culture, so much the higher.