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Illustration: Julien Pacaud
"Do you know who Aaron Swartz is?" asks digital-rights lawyer Dylan Stack. He answers his own question: "The computer activist who committed suicide after an unrelenting campaign from federal prosecutors to imprison him. In his memory, I'm attempting to organize a class action against prosecutorial overcharging."
Now, keep in mind, this was on a television show—and not some sober-minded PBS documentary about Swartz. It wasn't even cable news or a geek-centered sitcom like The Big Bang Theory. This was, in fact, a sleek legal procedural drama on network television: The Good Wife, a CBS show about a lawyer, Alicia Florrick (played by Julianna Margulies), beginning its fifth season this Sunday.
Though putatively about the law (and Florrick's dealings with her Eliot Spitzer-like husband), The Good Wife has become revered among geeks, and for good reason: It offers the deftest portrayal of technology on TV. In fact, it may be the best force for digital literacy in pop culture right now.
Consider the episode mentioned above: It begins with a rape trial in which a high school girl tweets angrily about the football player accused of assaulting her. She's jailed for contempt, and the case falters until—in an echo of the real-world Steubenville rape case—the online activist collective Anonymous leaks a cell phone video showing the accused rapist laughing at rape jokes about a blow-up doll. Anonymous members show up in court, producing a spectacle. Meanwhile, Florrick and her team wrestle with a series of questions: Can faceless, anarchic online activists be trusted? How do phonecams change a crime like this, since leaked videos operate as both evidence and a criminal act in themselves? What's the legal standing of a viral image?
The plot was ripped from the headlines, but The Good Wife went deep into the weeds in pondering how technology transforms everyday life. That's not the only example.
Eike Schroter/Photofest: Courtesy of Samsung
In one episode, Florrick uses the transnational nature of Twitter to thwart British libel laws. In another, the show exposes an energy-drink company that hires shills to post comments on anorexia-glorifying "pro-Ana" websites. The Good Wife lawyers once sued a Google-like search engine for juking the rankings of a voice-recognition software company, in an episode titled "Two Girls, One Code." (Best moment: The seemingly senile, hard-of-hearing judge suddenly reveals mad tech skillz. "An attribute-based link-analysis is not a closed system," he lectures at the defendant's attorney.)
One episode even mused Talmudically over the legal and political meaning of Bitcoin.
When the show returns this fall, plotlines will include telepresence robots and an episode inspired by Redditors' bungled attempts to identify the Boston bombers. TV shows and movies, of course, have long used digital tools and real-life techie events as plot points—but rarely with much nuance.
TV OFTEN PORTRAYS TECHNOLOGY AS IMPLAUSIBLY SUPERPOWERED OR ALARMINGLY DANGEROUS.
In most shows, technology is painted as either implausibly superpowered ("Wait—enhance that image!") or alarmingly dangerous. Procedurals have been particular offenders. On Law & Order, the Internet is mostly just a shadowy place where teens are lured to their death. On Person of Interest, government agencies use pervasive surveillance technology to predict malintent with pinpoint accuracy.
The Good Wife avoids this Manichaean trap. This is likely due to the fact that the show's creators and showrunners, husband-and-wife team Robert and Michelle King, are inquisitive nerds. "I'm just fascinated by how society is changing through social networking and the influence of Silicon Valley on almost every facet of life," says Robert King. His goal is not to make a polemical case for or against technology, he adds. "The show doesn't try to damn things, because I don't think that's reality. The advances being used in a totalitarian society like China are also used to prompt the Arab Spring. Social networking was handled very simplistically on TV. We thought we could make it our own."
Much of how technology plays in the real world is a question of speech acts—a natural topic for a smart show about lawyers. "Words are the weapons on legal shows," King says. Plus, the show's writers' room is filled with tech-curious types; writer Corinne Brinkerhoff conceived of the Bitcoin episode after becoming fascinated by the alternative money system.
For technically sophisticated viewers, it's fun to have Sunday-night viewing that knows its way around SEO and crypto. It makes TV better. But I'd argue that The Good Wife's impact is deeper than that. It potentially makes reality better.
Fictive depictions of technology are influential. TV and movies have long shaped how everyday people understand the world—and more important, how they misunderstand it.
For example, the parade of evil hackers in Hollywood movies look far more powerful than in reality. But politicians have responded to the movie version of blackhat coders, passing laws that clamp down on even innocuous computer activity. The Reagan-era Congress was so frightened by the cartoonish hacker exploits in War Games that it passed sweeping computer-crime laws still used as a legal bludgeon today. More recently, the prosecutors of Bradley Manning invoked these tired tropes. They said the use of basic Unix commands—and white-on-black, DOS-style displays—was inherently nefarious, because hey: Isn't that how hackers look on TV? In the '30s we had "reefer madness" movies; the Electronic Frontier Foundation calls this "hacker madness."
That's why The Good Wife is such a blast of much-needed oxygen. I'd like to think we can assess social change calmly and dispassionately, that we can map the contours of our digital world by parsing trenchant nonfiction and keeping abreast of the news.
But we're narrative creatures. Stories matter; fiction matters. Like it or not, they're where digital literacy—and illiteracy—begins. If people are going to make sense of how technology changes society, we desperately need smart tales and smart tale-tellers.
The Good Wife is a perfectly entertaining procedural, but if it manages to teach people the meanings behind a technological society, so much the better.
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