Here's a summary of week 9's lecture notes on - Cyberpunk!

• Cyberpunk is a science fiction genre based in the possibilities inherent in computers, genetics, body modifications and corporate developments in the near future.
• Punk was represented in the music of bands such as Sex Pistols, Clash & Black Assassins.
• Cyberpunk developed as a reaction against the over-blown and predominantly safe stories pf 'space opera' such as Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy and George Lucas's Star Wars. The precedents for cyberpunk can be found in paranoid and reality-challeging literary work of Phillip K. Dick (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep made in to the movie Bladerunner,) and the hi-tech for low purposes storyline in movies like The Conversation. Common themes include hackers vs corporations, artificial intelligence and cities out of control and and post-industrial dystopias dissected with a film noir sensibility.
• The Matrix (the movie) pushed the limits of cyberpunk so it became like the bloated soap operas that it had originally scorned. Nevertherless it deals with philosophical issues at some depth.
• This movie pushes the boundaries of computer-generated effects as it explores apossible future world where machines dominate humans but keep them inignorant bliss of their real state. The machines in Matrix create atotally illusory reality for people, constructing their identities tosuit the purposes of the machine.
• Cyberpunk sought to demythologise technology but effectively predicied/created the World Wide Web and so was used to remythologise technology.
• The last two hundred years have seen a large number of Utopian experiments where people have attempted to live out the literary myth, sometimes by embracing new technology (as in Robert Owen's New Lanark) and sometimes by eschewing new technology (as in the Aquarius Festival's Nimbin).
• The Shape of the City dictates the kind of lives that most people lead. The City in Bladerunner is avowedly post-modern,built up layer on layer but starting to lose its relevance - people are moving to the Off-World. Sometimes it is crowded, sometimes it is lonely - which is what cities are like: you can be anonymousin the crowd.
• The latest development to mimic the equalising structure of the telephone is the Internet. The Internet made it possible for an individual to 'publish' to a huge audience.
• As Bill Gates stated - the Internet made it possible for an individual to 'publish' to a huge audience.
• Shadowing this split between the technologies of dissemination and the technologies of interaction is the shift discussed by a variety of theorists from modernism to postmodernism, from the certainties of the 'grand narratives' of big institutions to the complexities of personal survival for individuals.
• But just as postmodernism is built upon modernism, the second media age is built on the first and is thus largely dependent on the the world view inherent in existing technologies. It is through the combination of old and new technologies that new industries, uses and expansions have occurred, and continue to emerge. The new media brings with it a need for new understandings - particularly political ones - to protect the public interest.
• Virtual reality duplicates and warps reality. Virtual reality transcends reality. It multiplies the experiences you can have and therefore the memories you can have. It alters the ways in which you construct yourself as a person. If the individuals are changed, then so is the society. This opens up space for new forms of culture to emerge.