William Gibson's "The Winter Market" and #EDCMOOC Week1

One of the blog prompts for this week asked us to reflect on utopian/dystopian representations of cyberculture on film.  After working my way through the recommended video clips and readings for the week, my thoughts are focused on a short story -- William Gibson's "The Winter Market."  The story was one of the first encounters I had with  an artifact that interrogated cyberculture and therefore, it holds an important place in my thinking about it.

The assigned artifacts for this week of EDCMOOC made me think of "The Winter Market" because each of the artifacts, as the title of this topic suggests, embraces either a utopian or dystopian view of technology and cyberculture.  Conversely,  Gibson, in my opinion, effectively negotiates the complexities of cyberculture in this short story.  On the one hand,  there are all sorts of troubling questions raised by Lise's "crossing over" into the net.  Most significantly the story asks, what happens to her humanity?  To her ability to relate to other people?  For Lise, what are the consequences of assuming a "pure" consciousness, free from the perceived interference of a broken, addicted, and insensate body?  Indeed, one of the central themes of this story is the failure of the human body in contrast to the limitless but disturbing potential for experience offered by technology. The story seems to offer rather bleak commentary in response.  On the other hand, the "real life" environment of the short story offers little comfort to its inhabitants, and a strong argument can be made that technology offers Lise the choice to exercise her own agency, whether her friend and "cyber lover," Casey, the narrator, fully supports or understands that choice or not.

The short story raises many of the themes addressed in this week's artifacts:  agency, consciousness, human interaction, humanity, even, though to a more subtle extent, the environmental repercussions of technology.  And yet, it offers no easy answers, no firm closure to say that yes, technology is an evil, or yes, technology promises the next utopia.  "Real" life, in this story, is not posed as superior to digital "life." As I was working through this week's artifacts, I continually stumbled on my own low-grade frustration at the persistence of these good/bad, real/unreal dichotomies, and the ways in which they seem to perpetually inform discussions about technology in general and educational technology specifically. The resolute messiness of Gibson's "Winter Market" is what makes this story stand out for me.  It suggests to me, that with digital technology, like other tools humans have developed (and worshipped, and denigrated) there are difficult complexities that must be addressed. Technology--any technology--does not exist outside the human context. There are proponents and detractors. There are pitfalls that must be mapped.  And there are positive applications that can make meaningful differences.

(Does my text-based analysis of a textual artifact mark me as a digital immigrant, I wonder?  Is the digital immigrant/digital native dualism even meaningful? This dichotomy, too, is one I need to consider in more detail.)