Meritums, Spectrums and Narrative Memories of ‘Pre-Virtual’ Computing in Cold War Europe

Abstract

The paper describes narrative interviews with 12 first generation users of home or personal computers (PCs) in Poland and the UK. Insights are gained into how computers were perceived and interpreted on either side of the Cold War divide in the decade prior to the end of the socialist system and the period of transition in the early 1990s. The narratives are suggestive in their implications for contemporary social theory, much of which has tended to implicate widespread use of PCs in the idea of an aesthetic regime distinctive to a new, informational kind of capitalism. This aesthetic regime attaches importance to visual experience and to the idea that increasingly we operate in environments that are ‘virtual’. Although the sample in the study is very limited, its findings are suggestive for theorists who have tended to take the salience of this aesthetic for granted as if it were a necessary consequence of widespread computerisation, rather than viewing its construction and maintenance as themselves sociologically problematic. The interviews subvert this, as subjects remember different uses of computer technology, including some that are suggestive of possible alternative aesthetic regimes.