a ponderous chain

in this interview with William Gibson, the nameless and impersonal entity known as amazon.com asked Gibson about how he does research. his answer involved, not surprisingly, everyone's favourite instant-information-delivery system: Google. here is the quote I found most interesting (clipped just a little bit)--

"One of the things I discovered while I was writing Pattern Recognition is that I now think that any contemporary novel today has a kind of Google novel aura around it, where somebody's going to google everything in the text. [...] it's sort of like there's this nebulous extended text. Everything is hyperlinked now. Some of it you actually have to type it in to get it, but it's all hyperlinked. It really changes things. I'm sure a lot of writers haven't yet realized how it changes things, but I find myself googling everything that goes into the text, and sometimes being led off in a completely different direction."

but it's not like this nebulous extended text didn't exist before we had the internet to link it all together. there's always been context. there has always been a bigger picture and an even bigger picture than that, made of more details than anyone can keep in their head at one time. but before, it was so much harder to read. so much farther away. and today we can hardly escape from it.

I saw this video floating around the internet a while back. it's not much more than hypothetical sales pitch, but interesting, despite that. books are changing. contexts are changing. the way we think and learn and act and share--it's all changing.


The Future of the Book on Vimeo.

so maybe that will be awesome and cool and also extremely useful. and maybe we'll get used to it.

of course we will. we are already learning to handle the thousands of completely different directions we can be led off into. we are already making room for the bottomless chasm of detail there is just beyond our fingertips. hopefully we don't drown in it.

speaking of Gibson, I ran across this really great portrait of him by this French artist. you can also find it here, on what some people have called the best named site on the web.

nebulous extended text. the ideas of an entire planet, all tied together by the infinitely long strings of hypertext. that idea is just overwhelmingly fascinating. for further reading on the subject of Gibson, science fiction, and the future of literature, take a look at this article by John Sutherland, or if you don't like that, there's this one by James Bridle instead.