I saw William Gibson (WG) being interviewed by Doug Coupland (DC) back in 2012. The audio of the interview is here. I pulled out my favourite quotes:
DC: We are surrounded by the voices of dead people, such as Elvis. We take it for granted that we can hear the voices of the dead.
DC: All sentient beings imagine themselves as the centre of the universe.
DC: I grew up with the notion that my life is a story - This is a 20th C. outdated conceit. Now a kid grows up with the notion that his life is a spreadsheet.
WG: Life is one damn thing after another. It's not good to see life as a story.
DC: Doug's Law: You can have either information or a life, but not both.
DC: People today can't distinguish between lived life and virtual life. The speed and memory of being on line are irreversibly addictive.
WG: It's not really the speed and memory that are addictive. We are addicted to the transparency of experience. We want to be there in a "real" experience. We want reality on demand. Speed and memory are a natural desire.
Ed note (Lil) - my understanding of transparency addictiveness is that we want more thoroughly involved versions of now. -- at least that's what we believe we're getting by being connected all the time.
DC: "Imagined literary futures melt like ice cream in the trunk of your car." [literary futures such as 1984]
WG: If I knew what those in the future think of us, I'd know everything I need to know about them.
DC: 97 is the new 100 IQ. Does your brain feel different now than it did in 1992?
WG: With connection to the global instantaneous memory prosthetic (Google), the world is a bit less mysterious. Ignorance was a brilliant screen on which the imagination could project.
WG: If all the networks converge, it would be a singularity.
DC: Geek Rapture.
WG: We're already the borg. DC: The Catholic Church tried to suppress the fork because it resembled the devil's pitchfork. [DC talked about his rapture project. He is groupsourcing a mortuarial community.] DC: How is your life stranger than 20 years ago?
WC: I have good friends that I've never laid eyes on. It's a post-geographical world, an instantaneous penpal machine.
DC: Is the future friendly? Should we look forward to the future?
WC: We might as well.
My paternal grandparents were from Bastrop County, Texas. They spoke quite slowly. My maternal grandparents were from New Jersey. They spoke rapidly. However, my maternal grandparents found themselves repeating themselves a lot because that's the culture of the east coast - you say things quickly and inaccurately and then you circle back and reiterate the important parts. My grandparents never had to repeat themselves. My grandfather said "if you don't quite know what to say, wait. If it's important, they'll wait with you."