Critical Annotated Webliography

Question
Cyberpunk is a genre of science fiction that literally imagines our future. Identify some of the associations between (written or cinematic) cyberpunk and technological innovation in the popular imagination.
Introduction
The websites in this webliography are searched by Yahoo Search (http://hk.search.yahoo.com/?fr=FP-tab-web-t-ac), Google Scholars (http://scholars.google.com) and some online libraries. When I first started to do this assignment, I use “cyberpunk” as my keyword to search and received more than 3 million results. So I narrowed down the searching criteria by searching keywords like “cyberpunk”, “technology” or “science fiction” together. After reading a few of them, I have chosen the following websites to analysis. I will first give a brief introduction to all of the websites, then criticize whether they are good or bad and whether I agree with these websites or not.

What is Cyberpunk?
I will start by explaining what cyberpunk is. According to Dictionary.com (www.dictionary.com), I have got the following explanations. Cyberpunk is a term invented by a science fiction writer Bruce Bethke. It is a subgenre of science fiction which settings are always in a futuristic society with all illegal activities and people are dominated by computers. I traced the writer’s name and found in his personal website, Bruce Bethke has posted The Etymology of “Cyberpunk” (2000). He claimed that he has not invented the term cyberpunk. It was invented by writers like William Gibson, Pat Cadigan, Rudy Rucker, etc. He also mentioned cyberpunks have achieved its goals because all the contemporary science fiction has to mention cyberpunk, the Internet or computer technologies brought forward by the above writers. Finally, he wrote that the reality of cyberpunk has not differed from the one he coined. He gave his own definition towards cyberpunk at the end of the essay: “a young, technologically facile, ethically vacuous, computer-adept vandal or criminal.”
After knowing what cyberpunk is, I begin to search for the writer who contributed much effort on cyberpunk and is always being quoted when talked about cyberpunk – William Gibson. I first come across an online essay, Cyberpunk Revisited: William Gibson’s Neuromancer and the ‘Multimedia Revolution, written by Nobuo Kamioka from Meiji University. She first pointing out that William Gibson published Neuromancer in 1984 had made the term cyberpunk popular. However, she later suggests that Neuromancer has its own weakness. She wrote that “the autor does not have enough insight into the physical and social context concerning the newest technologies and our bodies.” It is because in the later work of Gibson, personal computers and Internet had already been used by the majority. While Gibson had written something really exists in the reality. Furthermore, “cyberspace is much less often depicted sur-realistically in geometric design than it was in Neuromancer” in Gibson’s late novels. As a result, his later work, though easier to understand than Neuromancer, is not as readable as his first one. Towards the end of her essay, Nobuo Kamioka concluded that Gibson’s later novels clearly lacks of ideas against the virtual world, for “he cannot break out of the traditional structure of popular novels”.
William Gibson himself, on the other hand, has posted a piece of writing called My Obession. Gibson had gained famous by Neuromancer because he never laid his hands on computers or modern technologies, which enables him to write something innovative during the 1980s. However, his later novels do not make a hit. Gibson had noticed this as well. W hen he published a journal online for Wired, he started by “I thought I was immune to the Net. Then I got bitten by eBay”. (Jan, 1999) In the essay, Gibson confessed that he knows the reason why his writings, apart from Neuromacer, have failed to catch the attention of the audience. In the 1980s, Internet has became common for the masses and they can get access to Internet easily. At the beginning, Gibson did not like the idea who even did not want to have an email account. Later, his addiction to buying watches brings him to eBay. He has to get started with an email address. He started to become addicted and eventually the first thing he do every morning is checking his own account in eBay. This dependence on Internet or computer technologies has made him unable to remind his mind as pure as he was when he wrote Neuromancer. Like he stated at the end of this essay, “crazed environments of dead tech and poignant rubbish turn up in my fiction on a regular basis, where they are usually presented as being at once comforting, evocative, and somehow magical.”
After reading this article, I began to realize that technological innovation will led to the fall of cyberpunk. However, the technology nowadays is so advanced. Does it mean that cyberpunk no longer exist? In what form does it exits? Then I come across another article, Mapping the Body in Cyberpunk Fiction and Science. Written by Mischa Peters, she said that “in cyberpunk we find heroes who want to enter the dispersing space of cyberspace, their minds merge with various spaces and technologies. Their bodies are ‘invaded by technology – by implants, by neuro-circuitry – electronic parts take over the role of organic parts. Technology seems to take over the role of biology.”
Bodies seem to be a very important issue in cyberpunk. With this issue in my head, I begin to search for another website. Technology as Extension of Human Functional Architecture is what I came across next. What makes me interested in is at the end of this essay, there is a section predicting the distant future of technology and human. The writer predicted that, “intelligent entities will be extremely fluid and highly independent from the physical substrate of the world.” He further predicted that the world in the future will become “a mix of superliquid economy, cyberspace anarchy and distributed Artificial Intelligence.”
The prediction of future seems horrible. However, as Joachim Schummer suggested in his essay, instead of conveying a simple moral message, it is rather up to readers to make their own positive or negative judgment on the fiction technology’s impacts on society. While many readers might feel uncomfortable with such visions, Cyberpunk has… inspired many, if not all, visions of transhumanist utopia..”
To sum up, like what Alexander Chislenko had mentioned at the end of his essay, “To current humans, it may look like crazy functional soup.” Yet, we should have our own vision towards the future.

Bethke, Bruce. (2000). The Etymology of “Cyberpunk. Bruce Bethke: Freelance Writer. Retrieved March 23, 2007, from http://www.brucebethke.com/nf_cp.html
Kamioka, Nobuo. (1998) Cyberpunk Revisited: William Gibson’s Neuromancer and the ‘Multimedia Revolution. Meiji University. Retrieved March 21, 2007, from http://wwwsoc.nii.ac.jp/jaas/periodicals/JJAS/PDF/1998/No.09-053.pdf
Gibson, William. (Jan 1999) My Obession. Wired. Retrieved March 25, 2007, from http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/7.01/ebay.html
Peters, Mischa. (September 29, 2000). Mapping the Body in Cyberpunk Fiction and Science. Universiterit Utrecht, Retrieved March 21, 2007, from http://www.let.uu.nl/~Mischa.Peters/personal/bologna/paper.html
Chislenko, Alexander. (December 11, 2003). Technology as Extension of Human Functional Architecture. Extropy Online. Retrieved March 25, 2007, from http://project.cyberpunk.ru/idb/technology_as_extension.html
Schummer, Joachim. (2004). Societal and Ethical Implications of Nanotechnology: Meanings, Interest Groups, and Social Dynamics. University of Darmstadt. Retrieve March 26, 2007, from http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/SPT/v8n2/pdf/schummer.pdf