Not only do the media and the public have a love/hate relationship with technology, they usually have an ill-informed one, one often based either on wishful thinking or whatever feeling it is that makes people want to be frightened.
Probably the medium most influential over the last few years with regard to technology has been the film industry, possibly because it is technologically based. Views of technology have been dominated by the negative one - computers going out of control (2001), computers taking over the human race, alien computers and robots being evil.
Ironically, and perhaps as a part of the equation, this has happened very much with the aid of current technology - the fish-bowls and enlarged shrimps of earlier science fiction films have been replaced by computer-driven special effects.
More recently, a new sort of computer image has appeared - that of the computer cowboy - this perhaps influenced most by the arrival of the internet. Here, we have the old story of the individual against the 'state' (whether publicly or privately run); the clean, tidy, wealthy, clinical view of computers, computer scientists and the 'official' idea is sharply differentiated from the poor, dirty, unkempt individual who spends their time sitting at home (usually a one-roomed affair), surrounded by equipment - often old, patched up, distinctly untidy, held together in a highly unclinical fashion. From this unlikely start, the cowboy (Clint Eastwood always stayed in shoddy rooms in shoddy hotels), would effect the rest of the world in a profound (and usually, from the film's perspective, beneficial) way.
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