Question 3: 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.
As a sub-genre of science fiction, the settings of cyberpunk are always related with a dark, polluted urban area, advanced technologies and criminal activities. Yet these settings have made its readers to associate cyberpunk with the unknown future. There are six online sources used in this webliography, located mostly from searching engines like Google Scholars and Yahoo with keywords like "cyberpunk", "technology innovation" and some cyberpunk movies or novels like "Martix" and "Neuromancer". In this webliography, the nature of cyberpunk will first be discussed, followed by different writers' viewpoints towards cyberpunk. A compare of their writings will be provided and followed by a summary.
What is cyberpunk? Christian Kirtchev has provided a detailed description of it in the website The Cyberpunk Project. (1999) The writer indicates that cyberpunk is an attitude how people react to the technological innovations in the future, when computers' are no longer fully under control of people. The computers begin to have their own feeling, the artificial intelligence.
In Cyberpunk in the Nineties, Bruce Sterling has pointed out that "... the cultural terrain had changed, and that made a lot of difference. Honest "technological literacy" in the 50's was exhilarating but disquieting - but in the high-tech 80's, "technological literacy" meant outright ecstasy and dread. Cyberpunk was weird, which obscured the basic simplicity of its theory- and- practice." (1998) He has made it clear that cyberpunk, according to his own opinion, has been a bypast. Human beings who have always tried to lay their hands on developing some imagined technological innovation are bound to fail. He used Frankenstein, written by Mary Shelley as an example to explain that human's curiosity on technology and invention is mistaken since "there are Some Things Man Was Not Meant to Know", as "there are no mere physical mechanisms for this higher moral law - its workings transcend mortal understanding, it is something akin to divine will."
Apart from Sterling's view on the past of cyberpunk, another writer, Nobuo Kamioka in Cyberpunk Revisited: William Gibson's Neuromancer and the "Multimedia Revolution", provided her viewpoints on cyberpunk and future technologies. She used Gibson's Neuromancer as an example to indicate that the science-fiction genre is a prediction of the technological innovation, namely "the coming 'multimedia revolution'". (1998) The fourth part of her essay points out Gibson's weakness. When Gibson first published Neuromancer, it became popular more or less because of the imagination on how technology and future would be. However, during the late 1980s when Gibson publishes his second and third novels, "personal computers had spread widely and the Internet had started to be used by the masses. Gibson, at the same time, seems to bring the technologies in these novels closer to those which actually exist." It is found that his second and third works are not as creative as Neuromancer. Therefore, these works were not as popular as his previous one.
Another post, Mapping the Body in Cyberpunk Fiction and Science was written by Mischa Peters and found in University Utrecht's website. Although this essay is a PhD Paper of the writer, she wrote something reflective related to cyberpunk and technological innovation. By first explaining what cyberpunk is, she stated that "cyberpunk novels are influenced... by the contemporary developments in science and they often display visions of the new technologies of today." (2000) And technology in cyberpunk has taken over "the role of biology" by means of using machineries as substitutes of human organs. She used William Gibson's novel Neuromancer as examples to explain that human bodies in this genre are often in conflict with the virtual body, or the imaginative body in cyberpunk novels or movies. By quoting Hollinger's writings (1991) about human beings in cyberpunk will soon lose credibility, she suggests that "New technologies are continually crossing once stable borders and are blurring familiar boundaries". This essay has posted a reflective warning that what could be seen in cyberpunk will eventually lead us to the foreseeable dead end – the dark, polluted urban area with advanced technologies fully or partially controlling human beings.
Gustavo Lins Ribeiro has posted the fear of human beings towards cyberpunk. The writer wrote in Bodies and Culture in the Cyberage. A review Essay (1997) that technology is crucial because "man's internal and external conditions is blurred". In cyberpunk, which is being connected to the world's technological future, human beings faced a complicated relationship with technology for their biological bodies will be "engineered, rebuilt, reshaped, and reconfigured" by machineries. On the one hand, human beings are waiting eagerly for the age of cyberpunk to come and wishing for technological advance. On the other hand, they are feared of "loosing memory, identity, integrity, agency, power and control".
With all the positive/negative connotations of the cyberpunk on movies and literatures, people might either be fear of or admire the future technological innovation. In Societal and Ethical Implications of Nanotechnology: Meanings, Interest Groups, and Social Dynamics, Schummer has provided that the dehumanized world is a human alienation and is qualified as dystopia. Cyberpunk has always provided advancement in technology even if the technology innovation threatens the human beings. And people should have their own viewpoints towards cyberpunk. As he suggests, "Instead of conveying a simple moral message, it is rather up to readers to make their own positive or negative judgment on the fictional 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."
It is true that people should have their own understanding towards cyberpunk and not just believe in what the movies and literatures bought to them. As Kirtchev (1999) explained in the last few paragraphs, cyberpunk should be controlled and used for good. The writer brings out the idea that "it is not tech that makes your chances in the future world, tech just enhances them, if you use it right."
Sterling stated that cyberpunk is a reflection of the reality early in 1988 by pointing out that ""anti-humanist" conviction in cyberpunk is not simply some literary stunt to outrage the bourgeoisie; this is an objective fact about culture in the late twentieth century. Cyberpunk didn't invent this situation; it just reflects it." We have to understand that cyberpunk is nothing but a science-fiction genre, which should not hinder the future technological developments.
References
Sterling, Bruce. “ Cyberpunk in the Nineties”. Street Tech, 1998. Retrieved March 20, 2007, http://www.streettech.com/bcp/BCPtext/Manifestos/CPInThe90s.html
Peters, Mischa. “Mapping the Body in Cyberpunk Fiction and Science’. Universiterit Utrecht, September 29, 2000. Retrieved March 21, 2007, http://www.let.uu.nl/~Mischa.Peters/personal/bologna/paper.html
Kamioka, Nobuo. “Cyberpunk Revisited: William Gibson’s Neuromancer and the ‘Multimedia Revolution”. Meiji University, 1998. Retrieved March 21, 2007, http://wwwsoc.nii.ac.jp/jaas/periodicals/JJAS/PDF/1998/No.09-053.pdf
Gustavo Lins Ribeiro. “Bodies and Culture in the Cyberage. A review Essay”. Brasilia, 1997. Retrieved March 21, 2007, http://www.unb.br/ics/dan/Serie217empdf.pdf
Schummer, John. “Societal and Ethical Implications of Nanotechnology: Meanings, Interest Groups, and Social Dynamics”. University of Darmstadt, 2004. Retrieved March 23, 2007, http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/SPT/v8n2/pdf/schummer.pdf
Kirtchev, Christian. “Cyberpunk Understood”. The Cyberpunk Project, December 5, 1999. Retrieved March 24, 2007, http://project.cyberpunk.ru/idb/cyberpunk_understood.html
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