DREAMS REWIRED traces the desires and anxieties of today’s hyper-connected world back more than a hundred years, when telephone, film and television were new. As revolutionary then as contemporary social media is today, early electric media sparked a fervent utopianism in the public imagination – promising total communication, the annihilation of distance, and an end to war. But then - as now - there were fears over the erosion of privacy, security, morality. Using rare - and often unseen - archival material from nearly 200 films to articulate the present, DREAMS REWIRED reveals a history of hopes and betrayals.