Cyberpunk

The definition of cyberpunk from has something to do with the future technology where it impacts the life of the people in that future era. Because of the rapid technological change, it causes the social effects in different ways. Most of the stories that relate to Cyberpunk often happened when the earth is severely damaged. It often expresses a sense of rebellion, corruption in governments, and alienation. Most of cyberpunk stories happen in the near future and have negative impact of technology on humanity.
In addition, most of times when we see cyberpunk, there often have some type of fusion between men and machine. It’s not as same as cyborgs because cyborgs are purely made by machine to imitate human characteristic, but the fusion is different. For the fusion, the machine affects the control of the human perception, usually involves with some virtual reality environment images either taking place in the real world or in cyber world. Much like what we saw in Johnny Mnemonic where he went into virtual world via internet. We consider that men fusions with the machine are still humans.
Hackers are also important for cyberpunk genre. Hackers always have the big role to break into another organization or corporation’s computer security system to steal important information from them. They act like the Robin Hood or dark society side either to help or destroy one another.
Also the styles of cyberpunk visual are dirty and hyper-realistic “lived in”. We saw that when the character interact with computer scene visually and at the same time physically. Be able to move data or hack the program just a bare hand while maybe wearing high technology equipment. From many cyberpunk movies, we see patterns of dark motifs contrasted with shocking neon color schemes when characters work with the computer.
My reaction to cyberpunk is that idea behind cyberpunk is that because of fast development of technology, human society can’t adapt to the new technology and lost the control of the pace of change, so it caused many smart people or corporations using those technologies in the bad way to cause social problem in many ways such as increasing crime rate, poverty, disease, rebellion and pollution. I try to be optimistic about the future that it will not go as bad as many cyberpunk movies. If people are well informed of the possibility of cause and effect of the new technology, I don’t think we will have to go though a dystopian society. However, there are still many concerns about future including global warming and peak oil which could strike us in the near future. They could interfere with the vision of cyberpunk and it may change the direction. Of course, most of the cyberpunk stories were created during eighties which back in the old day, but we didn’t put the current global problem into account. The source of energy could be changing from oil consuming to other new resource of energy, so the vision of cyberpunk might change to something better or worst.