information:filtering, stylistic:style_transfer
Cultural impact

While punched cards have not been widely used for generations, the impact was so great for most of the 20th century that they still appear from time to time in popular culture. For example:

metaphor... symbol of the "system"—first the registration system and then bureaucratic systems more generally... a symbol of alienation... Punched cards were the symbol of information machines, and so they became the symbolic point of attack. Punched cards, used for class registration, were first and foremost a symbol of uniformity..... A student might feel "he is one of out of 27,500 IBM cards"... The president of the Undergraduate Association criticized the University as "a machine... IBM pattern of education."... Robert Blaumer explicated the symbolism: he referred to the "sense of impersonality... symbolized by the IBM technology."...