DMCT Week 2

            The rise of the cyberpunk aesthetic in the 1980’s often is seen as foreshadowing the development of digital media in the age of the Internet. Specifically, William Gibson’s Neuromancer describes in vivid detail a world in which people can jack into cyberspace and access mountains of information at the click of a button. Cavallaro argues “in cyberculture, we encounter an eminently postmodern culturescape wherein tecnoscience challenges the western tendency to conceive of the real as fixed and of scene as the means of quantifying and representing it” (Cavallaro, p. 36). The cyberpunk aesthetic focuses on the hyper-reality and constant reproductions of simulacra that is often described as part of the postmodern world-view. Furthermore, Cavallaro relates the movement to both Lacan’s psychoanalytic parable of the mirror stage. He also brings in Althusser’s concept of interpellation through which ideologies hail subjects into existence and requires us to adopt mythological and archetypal identities. The cyberpunk aesthetic and virtuality interpellate their subjects through fiction and fantasies. Thus, we see Neuromancer as a point where the postmodern ideology engaging with modern society through fictive and fantastic storytelling to provide a larger view of the rise of the digital age.