Between Divinity and Dullness: The Advent of Personal Computers in Italian Literature
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the cultural impact of personal computers in Italian literature in the first decade of their mass diffusion (from the mid-1980s to the second half of the 1990s) through the analysis of four texts written by some of the most respected writers of the time: Primo Levi’s article “Personal Golem” (1985), Umberto Eco’s novel Il pendolo di Foucault (1988), Francesco Leonetti’s novel Piedi in cerca di cibo (1995), and Daniele Del Giudice’s story “Evil Live” (1997). More than simply addressing the advent of personal computers, what these texts have in common is the use of religious images and metaphors in order to make sense of the new technology. This study aims at showing how this frame of reference served the four writers in expressing the contradictions inherent to the machine. Bulky and tangible because of its hardware, but animated by an elusive and mysterious software, the personal computer was perceived at the same time as a dull office appliance and a threatening virtual entity. Finally, by showing how timely and well-informed these literary works on the impact of PCs are, this article wants to make the case for considering the role of literature in shaping computer culture.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".