mondo.184: Bruce Sterling Live at Mondo, Part II
mondo.184.103: Bruce Sterling (bruces) Thu 13 May 93 09:02
Literary Freeware -- Not for Commercial Use
Speeches by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling
National Academy of Sciences
Convocation on Technology and Education
Washington D. C., May 10, 1993
BRUCE STERLING:
Hello ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for having the
two of us here and giving us a license to dream in public.
The future is unwritten. There are best-case
scenarios. There are worst-case scenarios. Both of them
are great fun to write about if you're a science fiction
novelist, but neither of them ever happen in the real world.
What happens in the real world is always a sideways-case
scenario.
World-changing marvels to us, are only wallpaper to our
children.
Cyberspace is the funhouse mirror of our own society.
Cyberspace reflects our values and our faults, sometimes in
terrifying exaggeration. Cyberspace is a mirror you can
edit. It's a mirror you can fold into packets and send
across continents at the speed of light. It's a mirror
you can share with other people, a place where you can
discover community. But it's also a mirror in the classic sense
of smoke-and-mirrors -- a place where you might be robbed
or cheated or decieved, a place where you can be promised
a rainbow but given a mouthful of ashes.
I know something important about cyberspace. It
doesn't matter who you are today -- if you don't show up in
that mirror in the next century, you're just not going to
matter very much. Our kids matter. They matter a lot. Our
kids have to show up in the mirror.
Today, we have certain primitive media for kids.
Movies, television, videos. In terms of their sensory
intensity, these are like roller-coaster rides. Kids love
roller coasters, for natural reasons. But roller coasters
only go around and around in circles. Kids need media that
they can go places with. They need the virtual equivalent
of a kid's bicycle. Training wheels for cyberspace.
