Slashdot Mirror
William Gibson on Blogging
The Ape With No Name writes "With Pattern Recognition now out, Gibson talks to the Guardian about blogging, which ones he's looking at and why he may have to quit blogging himself. He's quoted as saying '...if I'm ever going to write another book, I'm going to have to quit doing my blog as I have a hunch it interferes with the ecology of being a novelist.'"
is too much Amateur Philosophy.
It's not Gibson's fault, but that article was useless. Strafor, cnn, bbc, google ... wow, you've opened my mind to some new sites, Guardian! And as for Gibson's 'insights'into blogging ... . I imagine that a much more interesting interview was left on tape.
Actually, one thing I like about Gibson's style is how he uses invented terms - some you can guess from their morphology what they mean, others you can't.
So you form an idea of what each word seems to mean out of the context - like you do when you hear a novel word.
Finally most if not all of the new terms are explained a little while after they are first used, giving an interesting experience of how your deduced meaning matches the intended one.
...is simply being able to remember your goal.
Blogging is the antithesis of goal driven composition, and it's about time this was understood.
I can get a google search with porn turned off; why can't I get blogs turned off too?
I think this is too broad of a generalization. Sure some blogs are the typical, "what I did today" or "pictures of my cat" but some blogs are informative and can reveal things deep in a person's soul that you would never realize. Sometimes there is something therapeutic about letting your thoughts and emotions flow even if it's just strangers reading them.
rk
Rangers Lead the Way!
Does blogging aversely affect the professional writer's writing? The Guardian interview touches on an important question, but only briefly - this is one that should probably be tackled by a team of researchers. When I started up a simple blog-on-a-Wiki last December, I was a bit plagued by a similar question:
Why would writers write in their free time?
For me, as long as I can get away with taking one or even two week breaks from the blog, it is not a problem. "Write when you need to, blog when you can," is about where I find myself at the moment.
I am supposed to writing a ten page history paper right now, but no, what am I doing, posting on Slashdot instead. Blogging, posting to forums, watching Bill O'Reilly just to get angry, they are all more interesting distractions than writing a book or a paper because they are easier and don't require as much energy. If you get all your emotion out on the little stuff, you have nothing left for the book.
*yawn*
The kind of article/interview that would put anyone off Gibson forever. I'm so glad i just finished reading the brilliant Virtual Light trilogy, before finding out that he visits bbc, cnn and google. If those were the most interesting sites he could think of, it probably means he sticks to surfing pr0n only.
if I'm ever going to write another book, I'm going to have to quit doing my blog as I have a hunch it interferes with the ecology of being a novelist
Personally I found this pretentious bollox. Smacks more of an author trying to cash in on the current albeit dying fad of blogging to help promote his new book.
Newsflash William. Writing juvenile gibberish on a web page is not a form of higher art. Stick to the novels.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
IMHO:
I find that in his latest books, namely All Tomorrow's Parties and Pattern Recognition, Gibson has moved away from his previous style of "dark cyberpunk". Instead, he explores in detail how technology has social reprecussions.
In ATP, it was a basically about how the matrix of that future made it possible for certain individuals to see future change:ie. Laney. He doesn't emphasize it very much, but what this change in ATP was the advent of nano-fabrication, which is why in the last chapter he talks about how a watch is restored using nano-technology.
In Pattern Recogniton, it is all about the Internet. How messageboards/forums appeal to introverts like Cayce. Even key events, such as the list of numbers hidden in the fragments of the video clips were obtained through F:F:F.
Remember the girl who Taki thought was a japanese school girl but was actually a bartender they took a picture of to get him to give Cayce the numbers? Later on this girl (Judy Tsuzuki) finds out about the whole scam and falls in love with Taki, or so she professes. Someone she has never met before.
And in the ending, he reveals to us that Cayce has hooked up with Parkaboy in a boy-girl relationship. So, i feel that Pattern Recognition is more a commentary on how the Internet has allowed introverts to go about forming human relationships in a non-conventional way, rather than a dark and sharp cyberpunk thriller.
Be kind. There are too many mean people out there already.
Think you are tough? Try Finnegans Wake.
James Joyce was doing hypertext, blogging and all that a century ago.
Part of his 'dark cyberpunk' appeal in his past books was indeed the social repercussions of technology and how it affected both micro and macrocosms. In Neuromancer, Case was a loner, a hacker and a drug addict and ended up getting fried trying to crack a system. Alot of his friends ended up getting flatlined also. This paralleled the do-no-harm crackers back in the day (think Free Kevin) that really didn't damage systems, just explored them and exploited them. Ultimately Case wasn't in it for the money, he was in it for the challenge, the thrill of the hunt. 99% of real 'hackers' are in it for the same reason (and yes I know the difference between hacker and cracker). Gibson really distilled the cracker/hacker ethic at the time of that novel and focused it into a well-rounded character.
;)
Gibson has always been about exploring social connotations of technical evolution; hell, the whole genre is about that. Asimov had his decades of exploring the concept of humans living with robots and the pitfalls and joys they might encounter. Gibson now seems to be taking less the position of fortune teller and more the position of commentator on our times. Unless you're living in a coma, PR won't come as a surprise, and it's version of tomorrow could literally be tomorrow.
Call me old fashioned, but I liked his writing better when he wrote about the gritty, dirty underworld of the supercool. Maybe he SHOULD stop blogging.
Come to think of it, the main difference between blogs and other sources of information are editors. I think we all need one.
Remember the girl who Taki thought was a japanese school girl but was actually a bartender they took a picture of to get him to give Cayce the numbers? Later on this girl (Judy Tsuzuki) finds out about the whole scam and falls in love with Taki, or so she professes. Someone she has never met before.
Remember the story a year of so ago, here on Slashdot, about the guy on the (gaming I think) message board that made a female character, then made up his own relationship with her, and finally , when he got bored of the charade, wrote her out by having her die in a car crash. When the story came out much later (somebody recognized that the picture of the girl was from a porn movie) the people on the board were extremely upset, because they had felt real grief at the death of somebody who never existed in the first place. That anecdote asks questions a thousand times more profound about the nature of human identity and existence then anything in PR, and that actually happened.
The problem with Gibson's attempt at a Couplandesque contemporary commentary about the Internet is that it simply isn't profound. In "Iduro" it was supposed to be amazing that a character who claimed to be in a street gang on the Internet, turned out to be an invalid - I mean, can you believe that people don't know you're a dog! In Coupland's Microserfs, one of the characters falls in love with somebody in a chat room, and decides he wants to spend the rest of his life with them, without knowing anything about the person, not even the sex. That is an example of the way we define our relationships with others challenged and turned on it's head by this new form of connectivity - nothing in PR says anything new about life in the connected age.
And aside from the fact that the sensation of somebody's film fragments getting an online following is slightly less amazing then the flash success of "Am I Hot or Not!", PR reads like a Roberta Williams adventure game - Casey goes around "clicking" on random people which leads to conversations that solve puzzles in ridiculously convoluted ways. I and probably a thousand other people with me on this site alone could have done a better job tracing the source of uploads then what the characters in PR do. The reference to steganography seems thrown in for nothing other than to give an appropriate way for a bunch of random people to pop up and help Casey solve an easy problem backwards.
I still find Gibson's prose amazing, and that was enough for me to enjoy the better part of this book, but he either needs to go back to writing high paced exciting books set in worlds more interesting then advertising agencies, or he needs to actually start thinking about the true implications of the sociological shifts that he is trying to comment.
I would agree with you in the "losing it" department, but for me the slide started happening way earlier - although I can't decide if he was "slipping" in Difference Engine (because he was collaborating with Sterling) or Virtual Light. But by Idoru, I had a classic case of "who the fuck cares" by midway thru the book. I haven't touched ATP or Pattern Recognition yet, and if I do I'll probably check them out from the library first - I have better ways to spend my book budget than on authors who seem to be on a downward spiral.