Conformación del Trayecto formativo para la educación primaria

On June 25th, 1982 the feature film Blade Runner was released in the US. William Gibson went to the cinema to see it. Gibson was then an upcoming writer, having succeeded in getting a few short stories published, and he was working on his first novel. Allegedly, he leaves the cinema without seeing the movie to the end. The claimed reason is that the fictional world he saw in the movie reminded him so much of the atmosphere and settings of his coming novel, that he was afraid of being too deeply influenced by this competing vision (Heuser, 2003; Landon, 1992; Tatsumi, 1986).

Gibson continued working on his novel, and at the Armadillo Con in October 1982 he read the opening chapter of his work-in-progress. The novel Neuromancer was published almost two years later, on July 1st, 1984. It became one of the canonical works of the cyberpunk genre, and became widely known for being the novel where Gibson popularized cyberspace. The first occurrence of cyberspace was actually in Gibson’s short story Burning Chrome, published two year before Neuromancer. The word cyberspace is used only once, describing the console that the hackers use as a “cyberspace seven”, and the virtual environment itself is referred to as “the matrix”. The canonical status of Neuromancer gives the appearance that Gibson’s ideas were unprecedented, but of course he built on previous works and real-life technologies. In an interview (Gross, 1989) he describes his influences.

So that rather than having to look at a television set and put on the earphones, you simply plug yourself into something that makes you feel that you’re in the

environment that the media producer has generated. So taking that as a given, and that’s an old idea from science fiction, in the fifties they called that ‘feelies’ in science fiction. Taking that as a given, I’ve coupled that with computer technology to try to imagine a world in which computer operators enter into what I’ve only ever been able to describe as a ‘consensual hallucination’.

The feelies he refers to comes from Aldous Huxley who vaguely hints at an

immersive, multisensory recording technology in his Brave New World (1932). That novel was published in 1932, fifty years before Burning Chrome.

In interviews, Gibson has also claimed that he was inspired by watching teenage gamers at arcade halls (Csicsery-Ronay, 1992; McHale, 1992; Turkle, 1995), as well as a poster advertisement for an Apple IIc, and a conversation he had heard about “something ... called the Internet” (Wallace-Wells, 2011, p.217). Turkle (1985) offers the following description from Gibson of how he was inspired into creating the concept of cyberspace (p.265):

Video games weren’t something I’d done much, and I’d have been embarrassed to actually go into these arcades because everyone was so much younger than I was, but when I looked into one, I could see in the physical intensity of their postures how rapt these kids were. It was like one of those closed systems out of a Pynchon novel: you had this feedback loop, with photons coming off the screen into the kids’ eyes,

the neurons moving through their bodies, electrons moving through the computer. And these kids clearly believed in the space these games projected.

Here the concepts forming the word cyberspace – cybernetic (feedback loop) and space – connect to the arcade hall. The arcade hall was also the inspiration that director Steven Lisberger has claimed he had for the movie Tron. Gibson has also mentioned The Shockwave Rider, a 1975 novel by John Bruner about a computer hacker, as inspiration (Whittle, 1996).

Science fiction has a “long tradition of questioning the fundamental nature of reality” (Gunn, 2003, p.73), and the concept of cyberspace actually had precursors in different stories, especially in the short story True Names by Vernor Vinge (1981) (Hayles, 1993b; Wertheim, 1999), in Web of Angels by John Milo Ford from 1980, and The Veldt by Ray Bradbury (1950). The latter is mentioned as predecessor by Gibson himself in an interview (Wallace-Wells, 2011). Svante Lovén (2001; 2010) thoroughly accounts for three sets of precursors to Gibson’s cyberspace narrative.

•  Dystopias investigating the implications of magical artificial realms – Torquato Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered from 1575 and Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene

from 1589.8 _{Lovén describes Jerusalem Delivered and The Faerie Queene as “the}

first texts in Western literature which consider the multi-sensory illusion or imitation as inherently problematic” (2010, p.43).

•  Physical counterfeit environments – J. K. Huysmans’ À Rebours (Against nature, from 1884), and Frederik Pohl’s The Tunnel Under the World from 1955.

•  Virtual environments assumed to be created by if not computers then at least some electronic device – E.M. Forster’s The Machine Stops from 1909, Laurence Manning and Fletcher Pratt’s City of the Living Dead from 1930, James Gunn’s Name Your Pleasure from 1954, Daniel Galouye’s Simulacron-3 from 1964, and John Varley’s Overdrawn at the Memory Bank from 1976.

Philip Dick is best mentioned on his own due to his extensive investigation of political, religious and philosophical implications of simulations and simulacra. Dick is often vague with technical explanations, sometimes referring to drugs as a means of creating the illusions, which emphasizes that the simulated worlds he describes are a plot device, and not a theme in itself. These stories by Dick include Eye in the Sky from 1957, Time Out of Joint from 1959, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch from 1964, UBIK from 1968, A Maze of Death from 1971, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said from 1974 and I hope I shall arrive soon from 1979. Most of these predate public awareness of computers, and therefore their depictions of simulations are mostly inspired by television (Lovén, 2001).

Many of the stories mentioned by Lovén – most notably À Rebours, City of the Living Dead, The Machine Stops, and Name Your Pleasure – feature more or less explicit warnings about being trapped in illusion and rejecting nature and body, themes that still prevail in modern texts (Willim, 2006a). Movies such as The Matrix borrow

8 _{Note how these artificial realms are explained by magic, since at the time of these writings there}

many themes and tropes from these pre-cyberpunk novels and short stories.

However, two aspects that made both True Names and Neuromancer revolutionary at the start of the 1980s were how they depicted a computer network as a spatial environment, and how the artificiality was neither an imprisonment nor an attempt to simulate the actual world. The cyberspace that Gibson envisioned instead

“announces its artificiality” (Lovén, 2010, p.189).

What is cyberspace? In the short story Burning Chrome, Gibson explains it as

an abstract representation of the relationships between data systems. Legitimate programmers jack into their employers' sector of the matrix and find themselves surrounded by bright geometries representing the corporate data. Towers and fields of it ranged in the colorless non- space of the simulation matrix, the electronic consensus hallucination that facilitates the handling and exchange of massive quantities of data.

The explanation is essentially the same in Gibson’s novel Neuromancer, repeating the term “consensual hallucination”. This fictional cyberspace was gradually

reconceptualized when academics and the general public started to adopt the concept (Grau, 2003; Klastrup, 2003a), and Gibson’s fictional ideas inspired real- life work on virtual reality and the Internet (Hayles, 1993b; Hayles, 1999; Willim, 2006a). Benedikt (1991) reformulated Gibson’s description into a less poetic, more precise interpretation of what cyberspace became: “a globally networked,

computer-sustained, computer accessed, and computer-generated,

multidimensional, artificial, or ‘virtual’ reality” (p.122). Nusselder (2009) calls cyberspace “the mental realm of the human-computer interface that turns us into cyborgs” (p.5), and continues to define it as “the ‘electronic space’ that came into existence during the 1960s through a joining together of various computer

networks” (p.11). It is characteristic that these cyberspace descriptions emphasize the network, thus including both the Internet and virtual reality. This echoes the anticipations for the 3d Web that were apparent during the 1990s. Gibson’s

fictional cyberspace was adopted as a term for the budding Internet (Flichy, 2007). This is an important difference between cyberspace and virtuality. Virtuality is not directly associated with the Internet, even though the Internet plays an important factor in some virtual worlds such as in massively multiplayer online role-playing games.

Gibson himself has described the term cyberspace as an “evocative and

essentially meaningless” buzzword (Neale, 2000, at 55:07) and claims that its actual invention was quick and serendipitous. He started out with the term infospace but tried other variants since he wanted a catchier phrase (Heuser, 2003; Wallace-Wells, 2011). In the poetic essay Academic Leader (published in Benedikt, 1991, p.27), Gibson writes:

Assembled word cyberspace from small and readily available components of language. Neologic spasm: the primal act of pop poetics. Preceded any concept whatever. Slick and hollow-awaiting received meaning. All I did: folded words as taught. Now other words accrete in the interstices.

He seems to suggest that the word was an empty container later filled with meaning by others.