Academy Leader by William Gibson

Author:William Gibson [Gibson, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: sf

Once perfected, communication technologies rarely die out entirely; rather, they shrink to fit particular niches in the global info-structure. Crystal radios have been proposed as a means of conveying optimal seed-planting times to isolated agrarian tribes. The mimeograph, one of many recent dinosaurs of the urban office-place, still shines with undiminished samisdat potential in the century's backwaters, the Late Victorian answer to desktop publishing. Banks in uncounted Third World villages still crank the day's totals on black Burroughs adding machines, spooling out yards of faint indigo figures on long, oddly festive curls of paper, while the Soviet Union, not yet sold on throw-away new-tech fun, has become the last reliable source of vacuum tubes. The eight-track tape format survives in the truckstops of the Deep South, as a medium for country music and spoken- word pornography.

The Street finds its own uses for things - uses the manufacturers never imagined. The micro-tape recorder, originally intended for on-the-jump executive dictation, becomes the revolutionary medium of magnetisdat, allowing the covert spread of banned political speeches in Poland and China. The beeper and the cellular phone become economic tools in an increasingly competitive market in illicit drugs.

Other technological artifacts unexpectedly become means of communication ... The aerosol can gives birth to the urban graffitti-matrix. Soviet rockers press homemade flexidisks out of used chest x-rays ...

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