‘The lasting significance of cyberpunk is not merely limited to a massive export of themes and motives to the literary and cinematic “mainstream.” Rather, its most outstanding achievement is a discursive one: cyberpunk fiction helped create what I have decided to call digital discourse, a two-headed monster which manifests itself both as a narrative discourse of literature and film (…) and as a cultural discourse of the media in the information age (seen in their totality). Heavily influenced by contemporary (that is, digital) information technologies, the phenomenon is best described as a discourse of information overload - it is a discourse which attempts to transmit a maximum of information within a minimum of space-time. (…) And the outcome: an astonishing density of data which we have come to know as information overload, as Baudrillard’s cyberblitz of pre-millenial electronic media.

(…)

Neuromancer’s discursive originality (…) created a very interesting paradox: the first coherent expression of digital discourse (…) first came into being in literature, in an ancient and ultimately low-tech form, a form which we would normally assume to be incompatible with, and inapt for, the discourse of contemporary electronic media and their consistant information overbombing. (…) [T]he discourse of overload introduced by Gibson’s novel appears to be literature’s last line of defense, an answer to the disconcerting question “How to save literature from existinction?”’

— Alen Vitas, 2000, ‘Warp 9 to Hyperreality: Information Velocity and the End of the Space Age’, in: Kraus, E. and Auer, C., Simulacrum America: The USA and the Popular Media (Rochester, NY: Camden House), pp. 122-135