Computers that beeb and burble: This dates from the days of teletypes, I think, where they made noises (remember the football results one?). A combination of this and low-speed serial transmission that you could hear via short wave radio.
Flashing lights: This goes back all the way to ENIAC I think, where the output from its programs was displayed on a panel with rows of lights that lit up to display numbers in binary. It amuses me that in Alien which is otherwise a great looking film despite its age still their ship computer has a display like this 🙂 Of course entirely understandable; there’s no excuse these days.
I think there are a few reasons why computer screen still show rubbish even in an era where everyone uses computers.
1) TV shows still make money with product placement, so they won’t show someone using actual Google for free. If Google haven’t paid up they’ll have a mock-up which looks just like Google but isn’t.
2) Movies and TV obviously can’t be fully realistic – they have to convey plot points quickly and economically without labouring it via the dialogue, and also they need to show the actor’s faces at tense times and so on. So you get (for example) a spaceship scene which is a long shot of the bridge with the crew shitting themselves and the computer is reading out status messages like ‘shields at 15%’ or similar. If that was a close-up of a computer screen it’d be rubbish to watch. So in real life, you’d input a picture into a facial recognition database and it would say ‘thanks for your submission we will notify you when potential matches are found’ via a boring text interface and it’d eventually give a load of dodgy looking results which you’d have to sift through. If you did this in a typical TV show it’d totally kill the pace and you’d have to create a scene just to move the plot on. If you just show faces flashing up on a screen then going ‘beep beep match found’ then in a second you know what’s happened, and it hasn’t cost the company any money or time.
But this raises a wider point about the meta-language we use in storytelling generally, both visually and in books. It’s built from cultural references, shared history and established conventions. If someone in a conversation makes a reference to tumbleweed in the Anglophone world we all know what it means despite most of us not having ever seen a real tumbleweed. Another similar one is the call of (I think) a Red-Tailed Hawk signifying wilderness and desperation, although this is pretty hackneyed now. But there are loads more. When a TV show cuts to a new scene in a different building they *always* show the exterior of the building first so you know what’s happening.
But they do similar things with the actual plot as well not just visuals. They build the story in a way we’re used to it being built. This is how we are able to half-watch a typical show whilst doing something else and still follow it – we are able to pick out the important bits – e.g. we know when they are doing a recap scene and we will look up from STW for it.
If you watch foreign TV, the conventions, references and tropes are different, which is why it can be fascinating. Once you start looking out for all these tricks and cues you’ll see them all over the place. The burbling computer or the status bar (like the virus uploading one), the screeching of tyres to show urgency, the pointing of guns at faces (despite them never going to be fired) and so on are all visual cues. Other things like the maverick cop, the geeky but brilliant young female recruit, the nerd, the old cop a week from retirement, the shouty black police chief, they are all there deliberately to make everything familiar so we can piece the story together without really having to concentrate much.
I love this topic!
