![]() ![]() You can do anything with a cellphone: order food, do your job, read & write novels, maintain a lively ‘social’ life, engage in social status envy (‘She has a smaller phone, and a larger collection of collectibles on her cellphone strap! OMG!’)… Which is just another way of saying ‘You can do anything without seeing people, just by writing digital messages’. Gibson also discusses the ‘Mobile Girl’ and text messaging that culture began really showing up in America around 2005 1- Sidekicks, Twitter etc. They’ve been doing it for more than a century now, and they really do have a head start on the rest of us, if only in terms of what we used to call ‘ future shock’ (but which is now simply the one constant in all our lives). If you believe, as I do, that all cultural change is essentially technologically driven, you pay attention to the Japanese. The Japanese are the ultimate Early Adopters, and the sort of fiction I write behooves me to pay serious heed to that. The Japanese seem to the rest of us to live several measurable clicks down the time line. Gibson writes, back in 2001 (see also his “Shiny Balls of Mud” short essay): They are 5 years further in our future than we are (or perhaps one should say, were?). It presents the specter of the hikikomori-the person who ceases to exist in the physical realm as much as possible. The rise of the connected machines still facilitates withdrawal and isolation. Welcome to the N.H.K.!īut, the critic continues, things still are not well. We’re no longer retreating into our little cocoons, interacting with no humans. We’re forced to learn some basic social skills, to maintain some connections. The machines finally connect humans to humans, not human to machine. It is much more satisfactory and social to play MMORPGs on your PC than single-player RPGS, much more satisfactory to kill human players in Halo matches than alien AIs. ![]() ![]() Perhaps, the critic says, the rise of the Internet has ameliorated that distressing trend-the trends favored no connectivity at first, but then there was finally enough surplus computing power and bandwidth for massive connectivity to become the order of the day. And gamer after gamer was now playing alone. The increased graphical realism, the more ergonomic controllers, the introduction of genuinely challenging AI techniques… Trend after trend was rendering a human opponent unnecessary. The 4 or 5 person Dungeons & Dragons party (with a dungeon master) gives way to the classic arcade with its heated duels and oneupsmanship the arcade gives way to the flickering console in the bedroom with one playing Final Fantasy VII-alone. Spending months mastering Super Mario Bros-all alone-is a bad way to grow up normal. The basic idea is: electronic entertainment devices grows in sophistication and inexpensiveness as the years pass, until by the 1980s and 1990s, they have spread across the globe and have devoured multiple generations of children these devices are more pernicious than traditional geeky fares inasmuch as they are often best pursued solo. You may remember this as the Bowling Alone thesis applied to the Internet it got some traction in the late 1990s. If you crack open some of the mustier books about the Internet-you know the ones I’m talking about, the ones which invoke Roland Barthes and discuss the sexual transgressing of MUDs-one of the few still relevant criticisms is the concern that the Internet by uniting small groups will divide larger ones. ![]()
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