2 research outputs found
Silicon's Second World: Scarcity, Political Indifference and Innovation in Czechoslovak Computing, 1964-1994
How societies invent, adopt, adapt, distribute and innovate with computers is an important puzzle for historians of technology, economists, educators and government planners alike. This dissertation examines the developmental path of Czechoslovakia from when its premier computer scientist, AntonÃn Svoboda, emigrated in 1964 to slightly beyond state dissolution in 1993. An industrialized consumer society with little to consume, as Jaroslav Å velch noted, Czechoslovakia illustrates both the still-understudied history of computing in state socialist societies and the global story of innovation and adaptation in liminal spaces that provide human capital and emerging markets for the West. An alternate modernity emerged in what Martin Müller calls the 'Global East,' constituted by users living in scarcity, skeptical of state and capital power and maintaining the countercultural community values articulated by exponents like Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson and Buckminster Fuller. This work contributes to the ongoing turn in the history of technology away from Silicon Valley-centered narratives of invention toward the maintenance, adaptation and second-order innovation better representative of technological encounters globally. Czech and Slovak computer users are the focus: Their social origins, personal politics, creativity and negotiated autonomy framed the shape of computing in their country. Their stories are told often by themselves-in extensive oral interviews with key scientists, prominent dissidents and black marketeers-and in the pages of their community's magazines, journals and newsletters, in television interviews, in their jokes and ribald songs. Their voices are part of a global chorus of hobbyism, tinkering, maintenance and technological communities informed by scholars like Jaroslav Å velch, Melanie Swalwell, Honghong Tinn, Helena Durnová, Patryk Wasiak, Ksenia Tatarchenko and Nathan Ensmenger
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Gaming myth: an exploration of video gaming, heritage, and identity creation in contemporary Cuba
This thesis examines the relationship between video games and the creation and sustainment of local, national, and personal myths in contemporary Cuba. This thesis examines traditional notions of myth, particularly those which relate to culture and heritage. At the same time, it will analyse the evolving role which video games, and technology more generally, play in our lives, and how new technologies affect the creation and propagation of myth in personal and national narratives. This thesis will then go on to give an overview of the historical context of Cuba, a nation in which myth continues to play a fundamental role in the national narrative, and explore how video games are an increasingly central element of these narratives.
This thesis asks whether video games and computing can tell us anything of note about Cuban culture, and whether the games which are being played and developed in Cuba are part of a broader cultural and historical tradition which shapes Cuba as it is today. This thesis answers both of these questions in the affirmative, and demonstrates the significant impact which video games have had upon Cuba (particularly the more rural and remote parts of the country). This thesis also examines the question of whether gaming in Cuba might provide us with any practical or theoretical approaches to gaming which might be missing from the existing literature, and brings to the fore the lessons which Cuba’s unique circumstances hold for the furthering of the study of video games as an academic discipline. In order to support these assertions, the final chapter of this thesis is dedicated to a case study of the rural province of Granma. Using original interviews and fieldwork, this chapter combines the extensive historical and theoretical considerations which have been laid out in the preceding chapters, and applies them to the contemporary Cuban context. This thesis makes an original contribution to both the fields of Cuban studies and video game theory. Video game studies have traditionally been Western-centric, and have all but ignored countries such as Cuba. Whilst previous works have explored the role of myth within Cuba and gaming separately, this is the first work to study the manner in which myth underpins both video gaming and Cuban culture as a symbiotic whole