June 02, 2006

Gibsonian take on S/N

I have a lifelong habit of bing[e]ing on authors, reading everything if I've found some unique voice in something they've written, and then rereading the especially choice bits again and again. William Gibson has been one of those authors for more than 20 years, and this fragment from William Gibson's blog is pretty tantalizing and suggests that he's still at it:

Organized religion, he saw, back in the day, had been purely a signal-to-noise proposition, at once the medium and the message, a one-channel universe. For Europe, that channel was Christian, and broadcasting from Rome, but nothing could be broadcast faster than a man could travel on horseback. There was a hierarchy in place, and a highly organized methodology of top-down signal-dissemination, but the time lag enforced by tech-lack imposed a near-disastrous ratio, the noise of heresy constantly threatening to overwhelm the signal.

Posted by oook at June 2, 2006 07:53 AM
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