Google…

“Who is William Gibson?” …. “The Noir Prophet”

“What’s a Noir Prophet?”…. “William Gibson” …

That was me two weeks ago, having just been assigned my first Niki entry. I have to admit, I wasn’t impressed, let me tell you, it didn’t help that the more I read, the less I understood about the guy …

 By the end of the first paragraph of his Wikipedia, my group had so many questions, we were like Destiny’s Child in Independent Women …

Perhaps it’s the nature of his profession, maybe it’s his readers, or Gibson himself, but it’s easy to be caught up in the language surrounding his name, highly specific, intimidating words like ‘cyberpunk,’ ‘speculative,’ ‘iconography’ (and then there was ‘Noir Prophet’ on EVERY PARAGRAPH OF EVERY PAGE).

If one doesn’t understand the vocabulary which defines a subject or its context, it goes without out saying that content remains out of grasp. I am currently grappling with this as ‘Hypertext’ is thrown around the readings and symposiums, but that’s another question for another post, or maybe it’s not … see, this time two weeks ago I was having similar trouble with yesterday’s buzzword: ‘speculative’ or ‘design’ fiction … I couldn’t understand why this was somehow granted a higher degree of consideration than science fiction as they seemed to be a) exactly the same and b) equally ambiguous.  Take Gibson … from what I could gather he seemed to be writing about the same old stupid dystopian stuff, I imagined his novels in discount bins in airports, full of hackers and super computers and running down the ruined streets of New York City wearing tiny mirrored shades to protect your eyes from the glare of the eclipsed sun …

And yet, not only has he been credited with the definition of ‘Cyberspace’ and the prediction of reality television, people seemed to be implying that his writing had some sort of measurable impact on communication technology as we know it today. Well, let’s skip the part where I thought this was stupid and put off doing my assignment for the week, and jump straight to me realising what Gibson’s hype was about and how it pulled everything together for me.

I’ll admit that when my group and I finally did get around to the entry, I thought I would write three sentences pulled straight from the internet thesaurus. What ought to have taken me 15 minutes ended up eating up the better part of my day, the more I read about William Gibson, the worse I felt … the poor guy didn’t actually call himself the ‘noir prophet,’ plus, he kept on doing these things I think they call ‘cute jokes’ in the cyberpunk sub genre? Anyway, that’s when I decided to have a crack at it … it was only really when I attempted to write as Gibson that I realised I understood what everyone was going on about.

In short … here is what I gleaned:

• science fiction is about machines, ‘technological fetishisation’ : machines are frothed over for their incredible and currently unattainable capacity.
• while speculative fiction also concerns itself with technology, it has a distinctly human focus, technological advances and uses are largely employed as a lens through which to observe society ( ie. The way a society approaches technology is an invaluable indicator of the way it approaches humanity)
• critics and fans called Gibson a ‘prophet’ because his thinking was hugely innovative, he was writing about social media and reality television in the 1970s and 80s, incredible! (they called him the ‘noir prophet’ cos his stuff was also mega-depressing)
• Gibson created the language (iconography) for what is today a reality, the description and the development of technology are not separate, Gibson and his contemporaries gave those who deal in the actualised aspect of this the tools to articulate, consider and realise their objectives
• Who even knows what cyberpunk is?