The Care and Feeding of the Computer: Imagining Machines' Preventive Care and Medicine.

This article investigates how computing discourses, including user guides, news articles, and advertisements, urged personal computer users in the 1970s and 1980s to preventively care for their devices. Through hygiene recommendations related to eating, drinking, and dusting, these discourses warned...

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Publicado en:Information & Culture Vol. 58; no. 1; pp. 66 - 84
Autor principal: Plotnick, Rachel
Formato: Artículo
Publicado: University of Texas Press 2023
Materias:
Acceso en línea:Ver este registro en EBSCOhost
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        au: Plotnick, Rachel
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        Preventive medicine
        Personal computers
        Hygiene
        Computers
        Computer users
        History of computers
      sug:
        subj:
          Preventive medicine
          Personal computers
          Hygiene
          Computers
          Computer users
          History of computers
      keyword:
        care
        computer history
        maintenance
        prevention
        repair
      ab: This article investigates how computing discourses, including user guides, news articles, and advertisements, urged personal computer users in the 1970s and 1980s to preventively care for their devices. Through hygiene recommendations related to eating, drinking, and dusting, these discourses warned that computers' "health" depended upon humans. Importantly, they interpreted care as individual responsibility by putting the onus on users to behave properly. Within this frame, such texts described repairs as unfortunate medical interventions resulting from neglect. The piece argues that computing discourses have historically defined "care" and "repair" in opposition, as acts of doting prevention and undesirable intervention, respectively.
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    language: English
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