Cyberpunk
From MetaforasWiki
| Foundations | Structure | Metafora | Inflection | Return to Metaforas.org |
Culture has expanded beyond the conventional perceptions of time and space in the new realm of the electronic circuit. In his 1988 essay, "The "Cyberpunk: The Individual as Reality Pilot." Timothy Leary (American writer and psychologist, 1920-1996) suggests that a new sensibility is needed to navigate the spaces of the computer. The term "cyber" is derived from the ancient Greek word for pilot—sailors who navigated the Aegean Sea by wits and cunning, usually without a map or more advanced navigational equipment (see glossary for the literary use of the term "cyberpunk"). These ancient seafarers relied on intuitive senses to find their way. The later Roman pilot, or steersman, was less experimental—a reflection of the uniformity of Roman society at that time—and followed predetermined sets of orders or paradigms. Contemporary uses of the term cyber (notably those of mathematician Norbert Weiner (American mathematician, 1894-1964) and his cybernetics movement) describe control, not individuality or freedom. Leary's essay re-introduces the term cyber in the contemporary context. The pilot of the twenty-first century is the cyberpunk, a person in a time when "...creativity and mental excellence become the ethical norm. The world has become too dynamic, complex, and diversified, too cross-linked by the global immediacies of contemporary (quantum) communication, for stability of thought or dependability of behavior to be successful ...cyberpunks are the inventors, innovative writers, techno-frontier artists ...all of those who boldly package and steer ideas out there where no thoughts have gone before."
See Also
- Metaphors of Space
- Bolter
- Davies
- Concrete Poetry
- Memory and Space
- Cyberpunk
- Romantic Time
- Canning
- Minsky
