The Intimate Life of Computers
Digitizing Domesticity in the 1980s
Reem Hilu
The Intimate Life of Computers shows how the widespread introduction of home computers in the 1980s was purposefully geared toward helping sustain heteronormative middle-class families. Emphasizing the neglected history of the influence of women’s culture and feminist critique on the development of personal computing, Reem Hilu uncovers the surprising ways that domesticity and family life guided the earlier stages of our all-pervasive digital culture.
The Intimate Life of Computers shows how the widespread introduction of home computers in the 1980s was purposefully geared toward helping sustain heteronormative middle-class families by shaping relationships between users. Moving beyond the story of male-dominated computer culture, this book emphasizes the neglected history of the influence of women’s culture and feminist critique on the development of personal computing despite women’s underrepresentation in the industry.
Proposing the notion of “companionate computing,” Reem Hilu reimagines the spread of computers into American homes as the history of an interpersonal, romantic, and familial medium. She details the integration of computing into family relationships—from helping couples have better sex and offering thoughtful simulations of masculine seduction to animating cute robot companions and giving voice to dolls that could talk to lonely children—underscoring how these computer applications directly responded to the companionate needs of their users as a way to ease growing pressures on home life.
The Intimate Life of Computers is a vital contribution to feminist media history, highlighting how the emergence of personal computing dovetailed with changing gender roles and other social and cultural shifts. Eschewing the emphasis on technologies and institutions typically foregrounded in personal-computer histories, Hilu uncovers the surprising ways that domesticity and family life guided the earlier stages of our all-pervasive digital culture.
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$27.00 paper ISBN 978-1-5179-1665-7
$108.00 cloth ISBN 978-1-5179-1664-0
240 pages, 15 b&w photos, 5 1/2 x 8 1/2, November 2024
Reem Hilu is assistant professor of film and media studies at Washington University in St. Louis.
Contents
Introduction: Defining Companionate Computing
1. A Ménage à Trois with Your Computer: Romance Software as Mediator for Couples
2. “Not an Appliance, but a Friend”: Personal Robots and Participant Fatherhood
3. “A Doll That Understands You”: Computer Talking Dolls as Parenting Proxies
4. Sex and the Singles Game: Adult Games, Cringe, and Critiques of Masculine Seduction
Coda: Companionate Computing and Its Echoes
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index