*Got a piece of web design fiction here that references printed science fiction. One wonders if this isn’t some kind of convergence-culture trend. For instance, in printed science fiction novels it’s more or less okay to allude to science fiction movies, but if you put a science fiction writer in a science fiction novel, the suspension of disbelief implodes. But you can write a piece of design fiction that involves William Gibson, as in this piece, and it’s like: “Hey, I’m into web design too, so of course I read William Gibson.”
*When you think about it, it’s a little odd that futuristic science fiction novels lack a future science-fiction subculture. It’s as if the group as whole expects to be exterminated.
http://shareable.net/blog/everything-is-clickable
“It’s 2031, and I’m sitting on Chicago’s lakefront. Because it’s a Saturday morning, I have most of the usual information feeds that I leave running in my field of vision turned off, but a mini-map in the top right corner of my vision shows the lake front with my position and, about ten meters behind me, a constantly moving pair of green blips representing my daughter and our dog playing an improvised game of girl/dog ultimate frisbee.
“My AR display is a pair of specs — a fairly normal-looking pair of glasses that draws AR graphics into my field of vision. Thanks to advances in neural interfacing, I control the GUI through a combination of thought, eye movements, and gestures made where my specs’ cameras can see them.
“I look over toward a field house on the shore to my left. My specs recognize it based on my position and the shape of the building, allowing me to pull up a schedule of events going on there. (…)
“Augspace has turned the city into an onion — if every layer of the onion had a distinct flavor. The divisions between the layers are mediated by user tagging — an ever-changing folksonomy of human experience that defines channels in public augspace.
” “Gibson,” I say.
“Huh?” She stops for a second, looking down at her chest and gesturing. She’s cleared the graphic she was wearing on her shirt earlier and is now stretching a smaller version of the squid that the artist made available to fit in its place.
“I chuckle. “That was in a William Gibson novel. Spook Country.” Gibson flirted a bit with augspace, but I’m not sure he imagined how heavily we’d rely on it — or abuse it….”
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