William Gibson: Idoru: Waverider

Much of the joy of the novel resides in the details, the meditations on the nature of a postindustrial, postmodern, mediated and simulated social milieu. For example, one of the novel‘s main protagonists is Laney, a researcher and data collector for the SlitScan media organisation (a kind of hyperreal metatabloid, somewhere between The Sun, Celebrity Nudes and schlock TV). Laney’s a channel surfer, a waverider, a station zapper, with a short attention span, who is an ‘intuitive fisher of patterns of information…a dowser, a cybernetic waterwitch’. Intuitively, magically, he can browse the info-gestalts in data banks and, by finding the node point, a strange attractor, uncover the scandals in celebrities lives. He‘s kind of like Case from Neuromancer, a console cowboy of sorts who thieves the horrors and disasters from people’s lives; the hacker as tabloid journalist, you might say. It‘s in these thoughts on data and information, its relations with the subjects lived experience and actual life that Idoru is at its most interesting. In a sense Gibson’s offering an update of a Foucauldian panoptican: the lives of the individual citizen and subject are constantly open to surveillance and intervention through the traces they leave in cyberspace. In Gibson's near future, the life of an individual is entirely open, ever present (albeit virtually); s/he can have no secrets, every action and gesture can be known by the data it leaves behind.

http://www.theedge.abelgratis.co.uk/bookseh/idoru.htm

        Reading the notes on Wark's Hacker's Manifesto, this is what came to mind; there is something of Gibson's character Laney with his ability to uncover 'node points' that speaks of the interplay of context that I am interested in, in my work.