Where I’m at:

In the information society of right now, the average reader exists in a (continuous) state of information overload.

Barring the inevitable definition-wrangling - so far, so straightforward.

Following Sontag’s characterisation of story as narrative-with-closure, these technocultural conditions could see fiction reassert itself as a conscious act of curation on the part of the writer - forging signal from noise.

But to effectively [reflect|represent|map] the contemporary, increasingly information-dense, (social) world, and those in it, literature needs ‘to incorporate the overload of information into the story’.

Q: Does this require a different [type|mode] of [writing|text]?

Something ‘high bandwidth’; ‘meant to be read with Google next to you’ - this is the ‘Google novel aura’, a ‘kind of spectral quasi-hypertext’ that implies continuity with the world, but remains external to the text.

Presumably, this is also something that reflects (and critiques) ‘the cognitive superabundance of life under late capitalism’. Assuming that isn’t just another way of saying ‘information overload’. (Information overload = Future Shock?)

It seems like a strong way to approach the work of someone like Coupland, and there’s an extent to which I’m backwards, here … but is this a mode of literature prefigured by cyberpunk … with it’s ‘crammed prose style’?

What does it mean to look at genealogies of information-dense writing? The Crying of Lot 49 is clearly some kind of antecedent. What else?

Also, did Gibson write cyberspace into existence? Did a man with a typewriter create the conditions for digital discourse, as Vitas suggests? With people talking (seriously) about ‘Gibsonian eversion’, it’s tricky (if not impossible) to untangle the knots of representation/causality - can the emerging theories of performativity offer a solution?

We could read his post-millennial trilogy (Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, and the yet-to-be-released Zero History) as a fairly reflexive attempt to understand the impact his earlier work has had on the world of right now. Would that be useful?

(There’s some more stuff on Jamesonian cognitive mapping to come, we could probably use a critique of Manovich on databases vs. narrative, Hayles has some interesting thoughts on computational literature, Lash on information, and my supervisor wants me to concentrate on the trajectory of cyberpunk as a genre. I remain bewildered.

Actually; databases vs. narrative? Hold that thought …)