Week 9 of New Comm Tech (Lecture)

In our week 9 lecture, we learnt about the meaning and understanding of cyberpunk and the writer, William Gibson. Cyberpunk is the opposite to a fairytale scene, it has more of a gritty aesthetic and shows the shadows, decay, lust (as there is no love in cyberpunk; only lust) and capital of the scene. It also incorporates ideas that involve high technology such as human fused to machine etc. Furthermore, it also questions morality in the areas of opportunism, theft and murder.

Cyberpunk is based in the hybrid genre which includes hard-boiled detective fiction, film noir, science fictions and literary postmodernism. Hard-boiled detective fiction includes the topics anti-hero protagonists, crime, betrayal etc. Film noir is the lust, money, power, seduction, murder etc. Science fiction shows a world saturated by technology or post-apocalyptic or apocalypse never came or a giant anonymous multinational corporations. Lastly, literary postmodernism is a way of showing the story in short fragments or in quick descriptions.

In cyberpunk, there are many authors such as Bruce Sterling, Neal Stephenson, John Shirley, Lewis Shiner, Rudy Rucker. One of the most famous cyberpunk writers is William Gibson. He was born on the 17th of March, 1948, in Conway, South Carolina, USA. He grew up in Wytheville, Virginia and then moved to Toronto, Canada later on in life. By 1977, he received his Bachelor of English from University of British Columbia. Over time, he was written many brilliant trilogies such as Sprawl (which includes the books Neuromancer, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive), Bridge (which includes Virtual Light, Idoru and All Tomorrow's Parties) and Blue Ant trilogy (which includes Pattern Recognition, Spook Country and Zero History.)

Overtime, cyberpunk has become a lingua franca of digital culture. It has a huge impact on imagining human - and - machine interconnections and fusions. (Hopefully, a feature will include creating music inside your head and recording it onto a chip that can be transferred to a computer and then posted to the world, HOW COOL WOULD THAT BE!!! )

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