SOURCE: Freccero, Carla. “Technocultures.” In Popular Culture: An Introduction, pp. 99-129. New York: New York University Press, 1999.

In the following essay, Freccero contrasts the representations of technology-driven societies in Neuromancer and the Alien film series.

A. Technocultures and Postmodernism

In this chapter I would like to explore cultural productions that ambivalently represent postindustrial society's romance and disillusionment with advanced technological developments. The representations examined here present technoculture as an important dimension of both the present and the future, and construct a variety of responses, both utopian and dystopian, to that culture. Technology is the defining mark of late-twentieth-century First World existence in the popular imagination, and thus it is a particularly fruitful terrain for social and political analysis.

The texts I am discussing, in their disillusionment with the promises of industrial society and better living through advanced technology, engage in some form or another with the question of...