Life in the Meta City

In William Gibson’s essay “Life in the Meta City,” he explores the concept of a new type of city—the “meta city.” As a writer, Gibson is no stranger to the importance of a city in a story line and centers his stories primarily on or around fantastical and unusual cities.  However, in “Life in the Meta City” he discusses a city that is different than all other cites before; he discusses a city that is ageograpical. Since the invention of the Internet, it has become possible for people in all areas of the world to be connected at all times. “We all inhabit the meta city,” states Gibson, “regardless of physical address.” It is no longer necessary to be physically in a certain city to experience all the city has to offer and in doing so has changed how people live and view cities.

Gibson explores the different aspects of a city and what makes a city successful versus unsuccessful in his essay. As a child, Gibson lived in a small town in southwest Virginia and dreamed of living in a big city.  Through books, such as Sherlock Holmes, his imagination took him to London and he “reversed-engineered” a concept of urban life in his small town through his imagination. However, as Gibson got older, he realized large cities were more than just an increase in size; they were an increase in choices. “Cities afforded more choices than small towns, and constantly, by increasing the number and randomization of potential human and cultural contacts.” Through these random encounters of people, a city can than become bustling, thriving, and exciting by allowing the phenomena’s needed to create an interesting narrative. As a fiction writer, Gibson explains the importance of these phenomena’s in writing and if an author is unable to create a city in which these phenomena’s occur, than the city becomes a dead city.

Gibson warns about the effects of “Disney-landing” a city, or “ building themselves too permanently into a given days vision of what they should be.” Gibson, for example, writes that Paris has become an example of this and New York City is quickly following. These cities have become the cliché versions of themselves by over controlling and not allowing for periods of relative disjunction. The city then “looses their spark” and often perishes. A city must be ever changing and growing in order to continue into the future. But Gibson also writes that now, “The future of cities will consist of two different modalities combined within the ageographical and largely unrecognized meta city that is the Internet,” meaning cities must now take into account factors such as the Internet that allows people to master areas of expertise that previously required residence in a city.

             This essay can be related greatly to Willaim Gibson’s book Neuromancer because so much of Neuromancer is based around the dystopia city of Chiba City, Japan. In fact, the city creates the storyline for Neuromancer and this essay allows the reader to get a greater insight on the importance of cities and urban spaces in literature through the author’s point of view.