The falsification of Truth and Identity in William Gibson's Neuromancer.

Abstract

This interdisciplinary qualitative approach explores how the consequences of massive technological advancements lead to a state of falsification of truth and identity in William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984). Placing the novel as a mirror of contemporary society, it induces a shift to digital culture due to corporatisation. Employing the postmodern criticism, cybernetic and critical social theories, and discourse analysis. The analysis reveals how the corporatised consumption of technology and scientific manipulation falsify the individual’s identity and truth. The study explains that the novel’s key lens corrodes the natural humanistic mechanism, reducing characters to obedient subjects by inhabiting fragmented and fictionalised selves, revealing the vulnerability of individual identity in a digital, totalitarian world, serving as a tool for corporate and institutional control and reality manipulation, constructing a mediated sense of autonomy that obscures the erosion of individuality. In addition to the intertextual reading of George Orwell’s 1984, which reveals shared, timeless warnings against specific mechanisms of digital oppression across literary criticism. Ultimately, this approach argues that Neuromancer serves as a cautionary tale about the consequences of a high-technological society that blurs the lines between the real and the virtual.