Response Numero Three

"In some cyberpunk writing, much of the action takes place online, in cyberspace, blurring the border between actual and virtual reality" (Wikipedia). As illustrated in the book Snow Crash the Metaverse is a simulated world, much like the virtual reality depicted in the Matrix movies.
The plot in the Snow Crash reading reminded me of the plot in the Matrix - which also falls into the cyberpunk genre - and just how a virtual reality is utilized just as much as the actual world. The thing about a virtual space is that its hard to distinguish the real world from the simulated world. In fact, I had to go back and read a couple paragraphs to see if I as the reader was in reality or the Metaverse.
The cyberpunk article also explained how the "post industrial dystopia" world of cyberpunk genre include its good guys and its bad guys. The thing about the postmodern future of a cyberpunk story is that its heroes embody skills in hacking, a knowledgeable skill that can be considered criminal in our society today. Hiro has skills in hacking and also sword-fighting. Most skills in Snow Crash that are virtual are encoded, while they can also be REAL skills. Of course, much of the mentality in cyberpunk society is "survival of the fittest," not knowing who to trust but yourself. So, having attainable skills and encoded skills are essential in order to protect one's self against a uniformed, virtual space capable of controlling the activities within one's environment.
While reading our assigned readings, I noted a couple of things that can apply to our present-day experience with communication technologies. For one, our society has somewhat reached a cyberpunk state, in that its become technologically advanced and that the power technology has is determined by what POWER we want our technologies to behold. For instance, in Snow Crash, its almost as if the total power and control coded into the Metaverse world conceived the virtual space to become its own species, a species that protagonists such as Hiro and Y.T. strive to fight against to save themselves from danger and threat. Of course, that virtual power and control is at the expense of how much human power and control is invested in the space. Another observation is that the internet is somewhat of a pre-requisite to a reality that is hard to distinguish from true reality. The internet has become a place where everybody who is online exists with others who are online. Profiles, avatars, and PayPal accounts portray characters who exist at the control of the online-user. Since our society is capable of buying and selling "online," some retail sites now allow PayPal users to pay for items online, all within the comfort of one's home and never having to step foot outside to go to the store.
It would be cool if someone wrote a cyberpunk book that illustrated virtual-ghosts, like those people who have a low-profile online and utilize the internet without one's knowledge of their online existence.