{"id":1656,"date":"2007-08-08T10:07:21","date_gmt":"2007-08-08T10:07:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/2007\/08\/08\/william-gibson\/"},"modified":"2007-08-08T10:07:21","modified_gmt":"2007-08-08T10:07:21","slug":"william-gibson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/2007\/08\/08\/william-gibson\/","title":{"rendered":"WILLIAM GIBSON, NEUROMANCER, THE WEB AND THE NEWSPAPER"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"William_gibson\"<\/a>
\nI’m a big William Gibson<\/a> fan.  His new book Spook Country <\/a>—
\njust arrived and I’m struggling to wait to start it on an upcoming beach
\nweekend instead of plunging in like I did with Harry Potter.  It was
\nhe – and his book Neuromancer<\/a>,
\npublished in 1984, that led me onto the Internet in the early 90s, well before most of my
\nfriends.  Once I dove into cyberspace (Gibson coined the word) I never
\nlooked back. <\/p>\n

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

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

When I began working online, I encouraged clients to include
\ntheir 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
\nto 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<\/a> – on a public panel – call the Internet a fad – but that’s another story.)  <\/p>\n

The study goes on to report
\nthat TV still rules: \u201cin 2006 consumers
\nspent the most time with TV, followed by radio, which together combined for
\nnearly 70 percent of the time spent with media. That was followed by recorded
\nmusic at 5.3 percent, newspapers at 5 percent, and the Internet at 5 percent.\u201d <\/em> It then predicts that this year \u201cthe Internet will move up to 5.1 percent,
\nwhile newspapers and recorded music each move down to 4.9 percent<\/em>.\u201d<\/o:p><\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/o:p>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. <\/p>\n

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

 <\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/em><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading WILLIAM GIBSON, NEUROMANCER, THE WEB AND THE NEWSPAPER<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[5,6,27,7,60,51,52],"tags":[2180,2183,112,2170,66,693,2177,2178,10,2171,1067,2172,2179,2173,2176,2182,2181,2174,1373,2175,2169],"class_list":["post-1656","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-culture","category-current-affairs","category-life","category-science","category-webtech","category-weblogs","tag-cds","tag-cyberspace","tag-future","tag-gibson","tag-harry-potter","tag-internet","tag-media","tag-media-consumption","tag-music-2","tag-neuromancer","tag-newspaper","tag-newspapers","tag-radio","tag-readers","tag-reuters","tag-science-fiction","tag-spook-country","tag-sprawl","tag-technology","tag-web","tag-william-gibson"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4gBq8-qI","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1656","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1656"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1656\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1656"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1656"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1656"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}