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A Critical Look At CSI: Cyber
Trailrunner7 writes with the introduction to a Threatpost article (best read without coffee near your keyboard) about the new CSI: Cyber: The show centers on the Cyber Crime Division at the FBI, a perfectly focus-grouped cast headed by Special Agent Avery Ryan. She is a former behavioral psychiatrist whose practice fell apart when–spoiler alert!–all of her case files were stolen by a hacker who then murdered one of her patients. Now she is on a mission to "turn" hackers one at a time to the path of righteousness. She is aided in this noble quest by the guy who played Dawson, former child rapper Lil Bow Wow, and the two h4x0r caricatures: a bearded, wisecracking guy named Daniel Krumitz who is the "greatest white hat hacker in the world", and Raven Ramirez, whom we know is a hacker because she has dyed hair. Also, because her name is Raven.
As a public service, the Threatpost team, Mike Mimoso, Dennis Fisher, Brian Donohue and Chris Brook, watched the first episode of CSI: Cyber and kept a running chat log of the "action."
As a public service, the Threatpost team, Mike Mimoso, Dennis Fisher, Brian Donohue and Chris Brook, watched the first episode of CSI: Cyber and kept a running chat log of the "action."
It's pretty telling that in the starting credits for every episode, he reduces their mathematics and computational genius to "Sylvester's a human calculator", and he implies that because they are smart, they need a "normal" person to translate the world for them - when in reality, people are called geniuses because they are better at translating parts or all of the world than the folks they call "normal". It's a blatant fallacy that people that are smarter in one aspect have to be at least correspondingly dumber, if not more, in the specific aspect of social relations.
I know it's hard for writers to portray characters that are far smarter than they themselves are in any authentic way, but what this really means is that for this show in particular they need to hire some much smarter writers. The last thing we need is crowds of people living in fear of becoming smart because their social skills will wither and fall off.