Cybergreen

Bruce Sterling on media, design, fiction, and the future

Mike Godwin from the January 2004 issue

(Page 3 of 7)

What is different about the 21st century is the increasing intimacy of people with objects -- not in a sexual way, but in a bodily way. People have implants, they have gizmos, all these little barnacles in their pockets that are attached to themselves. To which they are completely emotionally dependent.

reason: And drugs.

Sterling: More like performance-enhancement devices. And I found it more interesting and more significant to talk about an intimate relationship with prosthetics and gizmos than an intimate relationship between one human being and another.

reason: What personal relationships with gizmos are you in right now?

Sterling: Well, I send my wife a lot of e-mail, and I never really expected that to happen. She's upstairs on her computer, and I'm downstairs on my computer. And we have an increasingly e-mail-mediated relationship. She's sending me notes, she's forwarding me things from my own family. My uncle, who is sort of the family webmaster, is now a much more influential presence in my life, due to e-mail. This is not uncommon. We have certain family affairs that are now electronically organized. Like, how do we look after our dad? We have little rules about who is going to clean the cemetery. We have a myfamily.com Web site where everyone uploads pictures of the children. My cousin's second cousin's children's nephew's bride -- I don't see these people except through electronic mediation. I wouldn't be seeing them otherwise.

reason: Instant messaging has taken more of that role. You have a sense of presence that's even more immediate than e-mail.

Sterling: My daughter's generation is more into that than I am. She's frequently chatting on her phone, doing role playing games with her closest friends who are a teenage gang wandering up and down the campus playing video games. Then they go home, as a teenage gang, to play role playing games, as a gang. They're the same people; it's just that they have different identities: the elf warrior and the dark gothic dwarf.

I'm very interested in those things, but the only game that commands my own attention is Web surfing. I spend huge amounts of time doing that.

reason: It never ceases to amaze me how much material is sort of spontaneously thrown up on the Web.

Sterling: I think that's an early response. You get this database toxicity. You go into a system like Lexis-Nexis and you put in a search word and get 60,000 hits, and you think, this is all the knowledge there is in the universe. But it's actually 10,000 references to six different things, and the actual story is something very few people know.

reason: I think there are some positive social changes happening as a result of this spontaneous database building and Web page building. There are more and more of us who reflexively look things up.

Sterling: There is a Google blindness. It's a kind of common wisdom generator, but it's not necessarily going to get you to the real story of what's actually going on.

reason: As today's children get older they're internalizing Boolean search logic, and they actually do show some discrimination and drill down to the useful information.

Sterling: It is a form of literacy that's really peculiar. Socrates used to talk about this: "The problem with writing is that no one memorizes the Iliad any more. You've got to just know all of it. And how can you call yourself an educated man if you cannot recite Book Three, not missing a single epithet?" He's got a point there.

It has a profound effect on literary composition. I've got Google up all the time. It gives you this veneer of command of the facts which you do not, in point of fact, have. It's extremely useful for novelists but somewhat dangerous if you're pretending to be a brain surgeon.