“Google novel aura”
Interesting interview of William Gibson on Amazon. An excerpt that I found pertinent:
“Amazon.com: How do you research? If you want to write about, say, GPS, like you do in your new book, do you actively research it and seek out experts, or do you just perceive what’s out there and make it your own?
Gibson: Well, I google it and get it wrong [laughter]. Or if I’m lucky, Cory Doctorow tells me I’m wrong but gives me a good fix for it. 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. So people–and this happened to me with Pattern Recognition–would find my footprints so to speak: well, he got this from here, and this information is on this site.”
Why do I blog this? writings has always been a matter of structuring and restructuring ideas, phrasing and content but it seems that with tools such as google there is a way to find “footprints” (traces of people in a “textual space” here). IT reminds me of some french sci-fi authors who started his book by quoting his “sources” such as scientific papers, anthropological and philosophical books. What was fun was to read the book from that perspective and see how these ideas were melted into the book, a sort of elaborated collage.
August 1st, 2007 at 4:29 pm
From the latest Wired
http://www.wired.com/culture/culturereviews/magazine/15-08/pl_print
Wired: One of the details that leaped out at me was the Adidas GSG9, named for the German counterterrorism squad. I felt certain you’d invented the shoe, but then I Googled it.
Gibson: The Adidas GSG9s were the obvious choice for the thinking man’s ninja. Nothing I could make up could resonate in the same way. There’s code in name-checking the GSG9 history — esoteric meaning. Something that started with Pattern Recognition was that I?discovered I could Google the world of the novel. I began to regard it as a sort of extended text — hypertext pages hovering just outside the printed page. There have been threads on my Web site — readers Googling and finding my footprints. I still get people asking me about “the possibilities of interactive fiction,” and they seem to have no clue how we’re already so there.
August 3rd, 2007 at 6:40 am
I wonder if they’re partly thinking about this project: http://fawny.org/pr/
August 4th, 2007 at 11:14 pm
What a great post.
The Fawny Project adds a new layer to William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition. I think this project is seminal in that it emphasizes and illustrates, recovers and extends a text through what it generates and catalyzes in the minds of others.
Gibson identifies that his book, and I would say everything, has a Google aura. Although I would also say this aura, “is not a trend but a tradition”, for everything we can get our eyes, hands and minds onto has a seductive – aura of inquiry.
More interesting is the current default perspective that sees any identifiable or defining quality or characteristics of an idea, thing, person or experience etc that can be translated into a search term leading to knowledge about that given thing person or experience.
Is googling the verb of the decade?
Has Google made questioning hot again?
The googlization of perception makes any percept or concept a spectrum of search tactics leading to alternative climates of content. Perhaps then, there are no things, only questions, concepts and conversations.