As the article explains, though, including some realism in the way a movie depicts computing achieves the very same goal as the noisy explosion in space or banking starfighter. If there's too much physics realism in a space movie, people will notice that it looks "fake" and their suspension of disbelief will be disrupted. Space movies have dogfights because war movies have dogfights, so people know what to expect, and the plot is advanced. Back in the 1960s when computers were unknown quantities, you could put whatever bullshit you wanted up on the screen and that was fine. But now that the majority of the movie-watching public has a pretty good idea of how computers work, having a "hacker" enter some kind of 3d virtual reality world to hack the NSA is perceived as ridiculous, even for Joe Sixpack, as if the movie depicted a scene in a McDonald's wherein the characters talked to a Maitre'd and ordered Steak Tartare and Chicken Tikka Masala. We all know enough about restaurants to know that's bullshit, even someone who's never eaten in a four star restaurant.
This is an easily-pierced trope of this kind of discussion.
"But now that the majority of the movie-watching public has a pretty good idea of how computers work, having a "hacker" enter some kind of 3d virtual reality world to hack the NSA is perceived as ridiculous..."
Are we in the future? Or, are we trying to destabilize the audience's expectation of what's possible? Or, are we trying to communicate to the audience that computing is so ubiquitous and so disposable that society has spent its resources on superfluous displays? Is the protagonist a fish-out-of-water invited into an enclave of super-advanced geniuses situated in otherwise present-day America?
Narrative is craft, and it's subject to expedience. The question to answer, in any given instance, is not, "Is this use of technology realistic?," but, "How does this element of technological unrealism operate within the wider context of the (obviously unrealistic) fantasy world of the movie?"
Anyone can come up with an instance of how this has failed in a movie, but the title of the article is "Coding the Movies: Don't Fake It." This person wants code to look real in movies, and that's a profoundly stupid generalization to insist on.
It's worth noting, too, that the author's "blog post" is really an advertisement for his consulting service. In a Habermassian sense, we would be suspicious that this element of the Lifeworld, this Communicative Action, has been colonized by the System, namely his need to get work.
> Back in the 1960s when computers were unknown quantities, you could put whatever bullshit you wanted up on the screen and that was fine.
Oh could you ever. Except back in the 60s, blinkenlights, tape reels and noisy dot matrix printers were more likely to be featured than screens.
I distinctly remember a 60s (probably, can't remember the name) movie where the con man lead character gets himself hired as head of a bank's computer division despite having no technical expertise whatsoever, and one technician explains that the computer is totally secure and this is indicated by a specific red light - as long as that light is on, it's secure!
