Tuesday, April 3, 2007

Depiction of the Web

As I began Galatea 2.2, there was a passage on page nine that I thought powers depicted really well concerning the web. He writes "People who use the web turned strange. In public panels, they disguised their sexes, their ages, their names. They logged on to the electric fray, adopting every violent persona but their own. They wizzed binary files at each other from across the planet, the same planet where impovershed villages looked upon a ball-point pen with wonder [*what a great line!*]. The web began to seem a vast, silent stock exchange trading in ever more anonymous and hostile pen pals...The web was a neighborhood more efficiently lonely than the one it replaced...it seemed to me we'd still have nothing to say to each other and many more ways not to say it...Yet I could not log off."
To me, this view of the web that Powers reveals and the way humans interact with it is so realistic to our current world (granted it was only written in 1995, but the point is he wrote it so truthfully). In effect, I think when people read this passage they are nodding their heads or at least relating to some of the things he said. Though not all people change who they are on the web or things like that, we at least know there are people out there that do all the time, some very dangerous people as well. I just though Powers did an amazing job depicting the web here and I notice as I read the novel that he uses this beautiful language, yet to-the-point phrases to express many other things as well, such as what I so far see as his love (or once love) for the woman C. (I'm not that far to know the whole story with C., but so far it is an interesting addition to the seemingly scientific world around Richard Powers in the novel.)

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