If Metropolis neatly represents the modern era, and the idea of a distributed and disembodied computer presence symbolizes the human reaction to post-modernism, what social construction does Gibson's Neuromancer and the subsequent flood of cyberpunk books represent? In the era of data made flesh and material poiesis, if the battle's done and we've kind of won, where do we go from here?
A number of scholars, including Phillip Thurtle, Robert Mitchell, Donna Haraway, and Robert Doyle are working in just this field; a field material poiesis or, to use a very inelegant phrase, the post-postmodern era. Studying the convergence of information, flesh, and the body, they are informed by Maturana, Varela and Luhmann while broaching new ground to explore how we are all, instead of being self-contained and separate individuals or replacable parts in a machine, connected and tied to one another.
As Jobs, Wozniak, Gibson, and Microsoft's creative team were all influenced by the cultural noise resonating in the early 1980s, this new group of academics are being influenced by the cultural noise generated by that early 1980s resonance, as well as ripples created both before and after. And as the component systems of technological fact move forward, science fiction moves with them, with the Wachowski brothers, Neal Stephenson and others bringing us updated visions of embodied virtuality and dystopic presents.
| previous | index | continue | |||||