But did he?

Cory Doctorow quotes himself in BoingBoing:

Doctorow on Gibson in Mindjack
My review of WIlliam Gibson’s Pattern Recognition is up on Mindjack today. The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” This is, after all, the man who coined the word “cyberspace”…

Ah, but did he? My understanding is that Gibson “merely” popularized the word cyberspace and that its existence predated him. I will now have to check this because either Cory’s greater credibility is rewriting my memory of past analyses of this or Cory is simply repeating a popular meme (“Gibson coined ‘cyberspace’”) without realizing that is it an oversimplification.
Gibson definitely gave “matrix” its connotation of a shared cyberspatial reality.


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