Chaos and Control: The Critique of Computation in American Commercial Media (1950-1980)

Tedious: feminized labor in machine-readable cataloging

“…According to E. W. Pugh (1995), the company participated Downloaded by [University of Toronto Libraries] at 13:15 02 August 2017 in the film partly to reassure audiences that computers were non-threatening to the labor force because they were unthinking and suitable only to take over repetitive tasks. Janet Abbate (2012) and Anderson (2013) take this argument further to show that IBM supported the production of the film in order to reassure women in particular that computers were designed to help them, not replace them, and to recruit women to enter computing as a profession. Although fiction, Desk Set attests to the ways in which computers and labor were perceived during the decade when they became open to public view in popular representations and mass media.…”

“…Colatrella (2001) examines feminized labor in the context of "information sharing, " but does not mention the repeated portrayals of the labor as tedious and therefore suitable for automation. Other scholars, some of whom only mention the film in passing, examine various other aspects of the film: the way ordinary citizens perceive computers and their consequences in the 1950s (Anderson 2011(Anderson , 2013Cheryl Knott Malone 2002), IBM's effort to recruit women at this time (Abbate 2012), the changing role of the reference librarian in helping to build "user friendly retrieval systems" (LaGuardia 1995, 7), Downloaded by [University of Toronto Libraries] at 13:15 02 August 2017 feminine labor as an interim step to marriage and family (Colatrella 2001;Flanagan 2004), and the personification of computers as female (Flanagan 2004).…”