Fritz Lang, who lived 1890-1976, was a legendary Austrian-born film director. He worked in Germany until he fled the Nazis in 1936. He went to the USA and resumed his career in Hollywood. His German films include "Metropolis," "M" (in which Peter Lorre starred as a child-killer), and "The Last Will of Dr. Mabuse."

In Hollywood he directed "Fury," "You Only Live Once," "Scarlet Street," "Rancho Notorious," "The Big Heat," "The Blue Gardenia," "Human Desire," "Moonfleet," and "While The City Sleeps."

In their new book, "Information Ecologies" (MIT Press 1999), Bonnie A. Nardi and Vicki L. O'Day use Lang's 1926 film "Metropolis" as "a reminder that our current questions and concerns about technology have a long history. Many of the particular technologies we experience now are fairly new -- voicemail, cellular phones, the Internet, and many more. But the challenge of responding well to technology goes back at least to the invention of the earliest machines."

Technology has the potential to completely overwhelm us: at the end of the film, the machinery fails, and the city is immersed in rising waters flooding from an underground reservoir, endangering everyone -- the 'masters' of technology, as well as the workers and their children."