Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is the difference between predicting and influencing?
Hard call: I'd have to say it all depends on the author's intent. Let's see ... at the time he wrote "Neuromancer" William Gibson had never used a computer -- he wrote it on a manual typewriter (and used the royalties to buy an Apple IIc). His creative vision was more one of social atomization and a particular aesthetic in a multi-national dominated future than it was informed by actual technology. Despite which, his…
In particular, I often find myself citing his depiction in _Friday_ of its titular character using a multimedia hyperlink system which seems analogous to the web and media-rich hypertext generally. (He gets wrong that it's an exclusive closed private system... that is wrong... isn't it...)
It's not the depiction of hypertext research that I find compelling...
...it's his dead-on intuition that such systems will naturally lend themselves to browsing by associate leap, far afield from the original research topic. And that serendipity and unanticipated (and unsought) correlations will prove both more compelling to users and more illuminating that narrow document retrieval would be.
Whether that same book paints a reasonable depiction of the current devolving global political climate is another question... but one which also continues to come up in idle conversations...
Btw @cstross just finally read Saturn's Children, Neptune's Brood, and the connective-tissue short work whose name escapes me. I greatly enjoyed the winks esp. in SC to _Friday_ etc. Thanks!