• William Gibson has said that "Information is the dominant scientific metaphor of our age." In Neuromancer, information in the form of multinational corporate databases (the Tessier-Ashpool core) or artificial intelligences (AI) becomes an autonomous entity. But George Lakoff, in his interview with Iain Boal (Composing Cyberspace 21-31) argues that information can never exist independently of the human beings who understand it. He says, "In order for anybody to understand 'information,' they have to put an interpretation on what comes out of the machine." Examine the ways in which human beings and machines, nature and technology, the mind and information interact in Gibson's Neuromancer. Are these interactions a positive or negative development in the human condition? Are the silicon-based entities necessary for carbon-based life forms? Does the "matrix" rely on human interpretation?
  
• In his essay, "Literary MTV," George Slusser argues that literature has been transformed by the technical advances of the "information age and the increasing fusion of electronic matrix and human brain, the world of global village and its electronic nightside." He concludes that cyberpunk fiction is "optical prose, one more proof that the printed word, as [Marshall] McLuhan suggests, has succumbed to the fragmenting speed, the instantaneity and monodimensionality of the visual image." Sven Birkerts is less enthusiastic, arguing in "Into the Electronic Millennium" that the new electronic media will result in an increasing, perhaps irreversible "language erosion." Is the writing of cyberpunk fiction such as Neuromancer as "brilliant and coherent as a laser" (Bruce Sterling), or has there been a "flattening" of the complexity and distinctiveness of verbal expression? How has the intrusion of technology affected our expectations for reading a "novel"? Will fiction, or even the "book" as we know it, continue to exist in the future?

Essays should be five to seven pages in length and should follow the formatting guidelines set forth in the syllabus. As I noted, I would like to have a print copy, which I will mark and return to you, and a disk copy, which may be in some part posted to the class discussion list for further comment.

All essays are due in class on Monday, September 28 at 10:00 am.

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