What is Cyberpunk exactly? Well, our lecturer described it as a "popular entertainment-form of science". With help from American literature it took us out of the 80s and into modern world of technology. This science fiction-literature altered shiny chrome into gritty aesthetics. It is a Hybrid-genre which includes not only science fiction but also hard boiled detective-fiction, film noir and literary postmodernism. Cyberpunk is highly technological because of all that happens in the shadows in our new tech world, such as jail breaking Iphones and stealing credit card codes from ATMs without even being near it. Our lecturer also described it as a technological decay; boxes of old parts that gets thrown away when not needed. Then some brilliant minds find a way of using these parts in our new equipment, such as the technology used to crack Sony's PS3. Finally, he mentioned questionable morality, which basically means not to trust anyone. There are large international cooperation's that controls things, and they're sitting on invisible literature such as secret government documents and our personal information.
Cyberpunk is built on lust. No love, only self interest. It is all about what you want and need from technology and different information. They're telling us that life sucks, so you might as well have a good time. This takes us to the authors of Cyberpunk. Some names mentioned were Lewis Shiner, Bruce Sterling and Neal Stephenson. They break down the language, and write in a short, quick way with a punch and without any long descriptions of large scenarios (which was normal in other fantasy - literature).
Another author with a huge influence on the topic, is William Gibson. An American futurist with a long list of books behind him. Some of his most important and known work is "The Sprawl Trilogy" and The Bridge Trilogy". In "The Sprawl Trilogy's" he writes, among other things, about Cyberspace (Neuromancer) and what happens when military graded software falls into the hands of civilians that knows how to use it (Count Zero). In "Mona Lisa Overload", which is the last book in this series, he describes human kind as one which is connected directly to the Internet, through wires in our brains and our dreams are dreams in Cyberspace. Just after the millennium, he changes his way of writing and the result is another series of three; "Blue Ant". This time one of the books named "Zero History", even have it's own trailer on YouTube.
Cyberpunk can be described as a lingua franca of digital culture which means digital objects into speech. Cyberpunk allows this change in language because this is the way we can understand our new technological world.
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