Mediated personae
Posted on March 13, 2003 @ 13:00 in Research
William Gibson posts some thoughts to his blog, about the scope of being able to create a mediated persona. Even in the type-and-run medium of the blog, he has a way with words. So, to keep this on file, here's the quote:
While I'm on the topic of mediated personae, something that came up during that CBC taping, last night (for me, anyway) was the idea that blogging (or even posting to fora) represents the democratization of the mediated persona. Literally anyone can have one, now, or several. I am an exception to this, because I have mine via the printed word, the oldest mass medium on the planet, and this website is maintained by a publishing company that belongs to an even larger corporation owned in turn by shapeshifting reptiles from Beta Reticuli, but the rest of you, today, are free to mass-mediate your own personae. Which was formerly, hugely, not the case. Choose a handle, post: you're mediating a persona.
In another post Gibson says that he hasn't reread any of his novels in full since they were published, so I wonder what he would make of this (expanded) footnote I have in my book about Gibson's coining of the term cyberspace.
footnote begins >
Gibson hit a nerve in the mediated, possibly already postmodern world, when he described "cyberspace" as a "consensual hallucination". The first time the word surfaces in his text, is in this sentence:
He'd operated on an almost permanent adrenaline high, a byproduct of youth and proficiency, jacked into a custom cyberspace deck that projected his disembodied consciousness into the consensual hallucination that was the matrix. (Gibson 1984: 4)
Later in the novel, he returns to this idea and elaborates on it, letting a voice-over in a childrens' program explain:
Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by millions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts... A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding... (ibid.: 51)
For Gibson the concept of "cyberspace" overlaps with the "matrix". The matrix however, is more like a visualization of the more abstract concept of cyberspace: a digital landscape consisting of a luminescent grid on a black slate, out of which geometric datashapes rise like buildings. This space is navigated by jacking into your cyberdeck and steering the icon that represents you around. In a short contribution to one of the first and most influential scientific works on cyberspace (Benedikt (1991) Cyberspace: First Steps) Gibson reflects on how the word "cyberspace" came to be:
Assembled word cyberspace from small and readily available components of language. Neologic spasm: the primal act of pop poetics. Preceded any concept whatever. Slick and hollow -- awaiting received meaning. All I did: folded words as taught. Now other words accrete in the interstices. [...] I work the angle of transit. Vectors of neon plaza, licensed consumers, acts primal and undreamed of.... The architecture of virtual reality imagined as an accretion of dreams: tattoo parlors, shooting galleries, pinball arcades, dimly lit stalls stacked with damp-stained years of men's magazines, chili joints, premises of unlicensed denturists, of fireworks and cut bait... These are dreams of commerce. Above them rise intricate barrios, zones of more private fantasy. (1991: 27-28)
There's a sense of wonder, I taste in his words, about the effects that his descriptions of cyberspace have had. Something that Gibson probably never foresaw when he first described the matrix in a dreamy glimpse, almost hidden in a dependent clause, when "[s]till he'd see the matrix in his sleep, bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colorless void...." (1984: 3-4).
Benedikt, Michael (ed.) (1991) Cyberspace. First Steps. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Gibson, William (1984) Neuromancer. New York: Ace Books.
Gibson, William (1991) "Academy Leader." In: Benedikt, Michael (ed.) (1991) Cyberspace. First Steps. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
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