Cyberthreats in Popular Visual Culture

Abstract

This paper focuses on how cyberthreats have been represented in popular visual culture (Western and Asian). These cultural products are an interesting site where the technical and the political effects of cyberthreats are presented together, giving them a particular weight and place in the discourse. The paper discusses three dominant representations (machine out-of-control, computers used as weapons, and amassing or withholding of data as threat) and then identifies three commonalities between them. The first concerns the surprising "passivity" of technology, making the human the main problem in this story, the second is the importance of non-virtual geography, turning machines into mere additions of normal human life, and the third concerns the normalization of the threat through time. Cyberthreats are part of our lives now and they are so deeply embedded, they cannot be separated from them anymore.