Old Rituals For Novel Space

A summary of:
Thomas, D. (1991). Old rituals for novel space: rites de passage together with William Gibson's cultural model of cyberspace. In Cyberspace: First Steps, M. Benedikt, Ed. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 30-48.

In this chapter, Tomas looks at cyberspace “from an anthropological, indeed ritual, perspective” (32), using William Gibson’s Neuromancer (and others) every bit a sort of relic encapsulating a culture, contention that “science fiction is an of import tool that allows us to brand feel of a apace emerging postindustrial culture” (32). He emphasizes inward detail a rite of passage from the secular/profane social ordering to a liminal period: “This stage is marked yesteryear a fourth dimension of ritual metamorphosis that mediates betwixt the initiand’s or group’s previous together with subsequent state” (37).

What’s of import for our purposes is Tomas’s declaration that “one of cyberspace’s to a greater extent than telephone substitution social functions is to serve every bit a medium to communicate a degree of ‘gnosis, mystical noesis almost the nature of things together with how they came to hold upwards what they are’ (Turner, 1977a: 107)” (41). Tomas relies heavily on Turner throughout this chapter. Here again: “Turner has proposed a distinction betwixt ‘liminal’ together with ‘liminoid,’ or ‘ergic-ludic ritual liminality together with anergic-ludic liminoid genres of action’ (1974: 83) that acknowledges an important, indeed decisive, divergence betwixt types of guild called ‘tribal’ together with ‘post-tribal’ or pre- together with post-Industrial Revolution societies” (41). In English, this means, “The transition from the liminal to the liminoid is broadly marked yesteryear a transition from the ritual collective to the secular individual, individualistic, or individualizing;” (42) “Liminal direct is constrained yesteryear obligations associated amongst status, acre liminoid direct is characterized yesteryear relative contractual freedom” (42). In other words, post-Industrial Revolution = the historic menstruum of selfishness.

How this relates to Gibson’s Sci-Fi novel is the following: “Gibsonian cyberspace exhibits liminoid characteristics connected to its economical functions every bit articulated inward a complex open-ended post-industrial society. First, it exhibits a specific logic that structures the matrix inward the refer of a transnational information economy. This logic, replicating the binary (0-1) logic of estimator languages, is visibly articulated inward the matrix, sculpted inward the copyrighted forms of information that structure, inward turn, social activity. Walls of data, rather than walls of brick together with glass, carve upwards a hardwired, or postorganic, humanity into economical protagonists – those included together with those excluded from, say, the dominant military/industrial complex. Those, inward other words, that create together with those that create non bring instantly access to information, hardware applied scientific discipline together with software expertise” (44). Is this a longwinded way of describing the modern noesis economy?

I similar this quote from Gibson’s “Rocket Radio”: “The basis before tv set equates amongst the basis before the Net – the majority civilization together with mechanisms of Information. And nosotros are of the Net; to think approximately other vogue of beingness is to acknowledge to having in ane trial been something other than human” (in Tomas, 45). The indicate here, together with it’s something I realized early on, is that there’s no turning dorsum to an before time, to a naivete. Even if the Internet were to die, nosotros would nonetheless empathise our basis from the perspective of people who at ane indicate had the Internet; together with amongst that comes a worldview that cannot hold upwards denied precisely yesteryear taking away the toy.