Tag: William Gibson

WILLIAM GIBSON, NEUROMANCER, THE WEB AND THE NEWSPAPER

William_gibson
I’m a big William Gibson fan.  His new book Spook Country —
just arrived and I’m struggling to wait to start it on an upcoming beach
weekend instead of plunging in like I did with Harry Potter.  It was
he – and his book Neuromancer,
published in 1984, that led me onto the Internet in the early 90s, well before most of my
friends.  Once I dove into cyberspace (Gibson coined the word) I never
looked back.

Neuromancer was Gibson’s first book .  Much of his early work was a dark view of a connected
world full of data pirates and megacities ("the Sprawl" in the US and
"Chiba City" in Japan) with skies, in one of his most famous quotes, "the color of television, tuned to a dead 
channel."
I believed as I read Neuromancer and then all of his subsequent work that it was a preview of a
possible future and that parts of it were already on their way. 

This appeared in Reuters today:   U.S. consumers this year will spend more of
their day surfing the Internet than reading newspapers or going to the
movies or listening to recorded music, according a study released on
Tuesday. The report comes from the highly-regarded private equity firm
Veronis Suhler Stevenson, which examined consumer behavior to inform investment strategies.  Where would future ad money (hence revenue, hence good investments, I assume) go? 

When I began working online, I encouraged clients to include
their URLs in their ads and on their business cards.  In the 90s, a major LA newspaper ran ad trailers in local movie theaters.  Of course I urged them
to include their website URL at the end of the ad.  Concerned about cannibalizing the print product , they declined to do so.  I tell you this just to demonstrate how much has changed and how little many thought leaders realized what was going on around them (I also once heard Michael Eisner – on a public panel – call the Internet a fad – but that’s another story.) 

The study goes on to report
that TV still rules: “in 2006 consumers
spent the most time with TV, followed by radio, which together combined for
nearly 70 percent of the time spent with media. That was followed by recorded
music at 5.3 percent, newspapers at 5 percent, and the Internet at 5 percent.” It then predicts that this year “the Internet will move up to 5.1 percent,
while newspapers and recorded music each move down to 4.9 percent.”

 Except for the fact that  it appears to have omitted consideration of the many of us, particularly younger people, who multi-task and have the TV, radio or music playing while we’re online, it makes sense.  More and more, our lives are online — and our identities too.  More and more the world emerging from the imagination of William Gibson is becoming our world.

Here’s a final thought – a little out there but not totally unreasonable considering the Gibson constituency.  Wikipedia tells us "in his afterword to the 2000 re-issue of Neuromancer, fellow author Jack Womack goes as far to suggest that Gibson’s vision of cyberspace may have inspired the way in which the internet developed, (particularly the World Wide Web) after the publication of Neuromancer in 1984. He asks: What if the act of writing it down, in fact, brought it about?"   

 

 

9/11 AND ART

Pattern_recognition One of my favorite books is William Gibson’s PATTERN RECOGNITION.  It’s the story of a "cool hunter" named Cayce Pollard .  Her job is to help worldwide companies evaluate their logos and design for "coolness ."  She’s a gypsy, finding Pilates studios in the cities she visits and completely engaging the reader (at least this one.)  Behind her quite remarkable self, however, lies her grief of the loss of her father in lower Manhattan on September 11.  It’s a shadow that haunts all the elegant activity, spectacular writing and remarkable plot lines that are part of any Gibson work.  Published in 2003, it was one of the early novels dealing with the horrors of that day in 2001.

There have been several since then, as well as, in the past year, three movies including Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center.  IMDB lists 11 altogether, not counting Stone’s new film.  Apparently, at least to those I know who’ve seen them, several of these films are pretty good.

Emperor Last night I finished a book saved, in its last chapters, by that terrible time.  THE EMPEROR’S CHILDREN, by Claire Messud, got spectacular reviews — front page in the Sunday Times Book Review — and sounded great.  What it is is a kind of lesser BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES about lefties living on the West Side (the Beresford is on the cover — not too subtle, right?), their offspring and several other 30-somethings who went to Brown.  The whole point of its 431 pages is to reveal the phony side of the lives of the politically correct with their Central Park West apartments, their kids – haunted by parental successes they can’t match, and the rest of the crew ten years out of college and aimless.  It’s all OK – but not great.  Then, in the middle of a serious act of betrayal by Grand Old Man liberal and a friend of his daughter, two planes hit the World Trade Center — right outside the window of her apartment.  Everything that felt so false for all those pages is rendered just as superficial as we thought it was.

I’m not sure it’s enough for me – maybe if I hadn’t lived 20 years on that very West Side and admired many of those people myself – all the while realizing that maybe many of them weren’t who I wanted them to be, it would make more sense.  I’m not sure why the book irritated me so and maybe that makes it better than I’m telling you it is – but it’s in my head and it’s making me mad.  Can someone else can help me figure out why?