I belong to a generation of Americans who dimly recall the world prior to television. Many of us, I suspect, feel vaguely ashamed about this, as though the world before television was not quite, well, the world. The world before television equates with the world before the Net—the mass culture and the mechanisms of Information. And we are of the Net; to recall another mode of being is to admit to having once been something other than human.
— William Gibson in the essay Rocket Radio (1989). Published in Distrust That Particular Flavor (2012) with a note: “I knew not Net, when I wrote this, though I had friends who talked Net, and fairly constantly.”
