Hmm. Really starting to appreciate just how much those two pages at the end of Aztlan did for creating a preconception of the otaku and AIs.

But 'the people' don't know that, either. They just know that any magician can make them eat their children's gut while they are still alive.

And, in fact, Alter Memory lasts quite long.

Agreed most emphatically. With the bugs about, there is no need for any government to manufacture an enemy to scare people with. No amount of technomancers could compete with the paranoia and fear that the bugs ought to inspire!

Oh come on, the technomancers blew up an entire hospital!
All the bugs ever did was kidnap thousands of people, turn them into horrible monsters, replace politicians, and destroy an entire city.

Those are. But how many others are there who are secret nutjobs -- but look perfectly normal on the outside?

Dread is not a logical thing.

Whichever side of the polarity you fall on, the influence of the mass media is not something to be underestimated. Bluntly, we still don't understand the full extent of its power. I asked a professor of media and information technology -- whose paper that he'd just given held a heavy assumption that the mass media shapes our attitudes -- whether it wasn't also true that (in a market-driven society) it was shaped by our attitudes?

The truth, I think, lies somewhere in between. Mass media (and often only one or two streams thereof) is often our only accepted source for information -- but at the same time the information presented is that which the public has shown a willingness to watch. Thus: if it bleeds, it leads -- which also creates a spiral of distorted perception, since I'm perfectly able to walk down most of the streets which are often painted in these stories as local reigns of terror. But if my only source of information were that media stream: how could I know that?

This is the effect at a local level: and I've first-hand seen shifts in reporting style and story selection shift public attitude. As to greater issues: no matter what the polarity of the ideology, there is a commonality of belief that the media biases information so as to encourage a specific perspective. (Disagreement lies only along which direction the bias is in -- not that there is not a bias, or that the bias doesn't have an effect.) And one step further: who chooses which stories to air? Who selects headlines, or spikes stories, or even plants them?

SR relevance is that almost all mass media is corporation-owned: and while corporations have retained and somewhat controlled magical services almost since the Awakening (see scholarship program) -- technomancers, for now, are out of their jurisdiction, and have powers that threaten them at a level simple magic no longer can.

Which direction does it follow that corporations would wish to sway public opinion?

Anyone remember the baby incubator story which spiked the outrage which led to the first Gulf War?

you know, normally when you QFT something, you quote it so people know what you're QFTing...

unless you were trying to indicate that nothing is the truth, in which case i have to disagree... nothing cannot logically exist =D

anyways, i would also point out that it is possible to control magicians to some extent. while a magician can do scary things, they need tools and devices to make it work. to make a focus, it takes enchanting supplies. binding requires binding materials. magicians need to have a lodge. to perform a ritual, you need various items (depending on tradition). to learn a spell, you must have access to the formula, etc.

technomancers, on the other hand, don't need anything. no tools, no equipment, absolutely nothing that can be regulated.

i would disagree with this. foci are nice, but they are in no way required for a mage to do scary stuff.

Doesn't this list prove our point? Wouldn't these three public misconceptions add up to magophobia?

Of course, there are philosophical questions about the nature of metahuman identity that might lead some people to the conclusion that becoming a Flesh Form just gives you superpowers and a connection to your new family, in which case Bugs are good. Who doesn't want superpowers? If the UB wasn't shut down, it would have thousands of people standing in line for days waiting for their turn, which makes me think that hiding their true nature was a mistake.

But isn't that true about terrorists today? Picture in your mind a terrorist. I can pretty much tell you what you see: an arab, male, probably with a picnic napkin on his head, with bandoleers of ak-47 ammo across his chest, holding an rocket launcher. Everyone knows he screams "Jihad!" and trills like a siren before he attacks. Everyone knows that you have several seconds to run out of a building if you see an arab man stride into a bank with an overcoat on before he detonates the dynamite strapped to his chest. Just because that's a popular image doesn't mean the fear stops there.

Public paranoia is so high, entire cities are brought to a screeching stop because someone saw a few litebrite signs on the sides of the road. My irish-german gramma gets scanned inside and out whenever she flies on an airplane. Arabs and anyone with a vaguely middle eastern name are refused service at restaurants. Most of the bill of rights are gone now for everyone. It doesn't matter if someone is carrying a rocket launcher or screaming "Jihad", the masses still want to lash out and public officials still want to grab control.

Noone knows if there even are any souls. And for that matter, there's no particular evidence that becoming a Bug destroys your soul any more than say getting killed or eating pork. Other religions can't "point out" that becoming a bug spirit destroys your soul because there's nothing to see that would convince you beyond reasnable doubt that this is the case. All they can do is make the unsupported claim that joining the Invae damns you - a claim that as I recall every major religion already makes about every other major religion to little overall effect.

Now, a true form or hybrid form is generally speaking "not you" from the vast majority of definitions of self. So by most standards a failure to become a Flesh Form involves you actually getting killed. And at the UB's start the creation of Flesh Forms was extremely rare - almost everyone came out as a hybrid and most of the hives and nests actually wanted prospective hosts to turn into True Forms. So when the UB was starting up they actually had essentially nothing to offer the people of Earth and had to operate in secret.

In 2070 however, when the remaining hives have been convinced of the advantages of creating Flesh Forms and have advanced techniques that allow this to be a prevalent effect - yeah there's no reason that hives couldn't just put out infomercials about the advantages of being a Flesh Form Hive Soldier and have people line up for the procedure. But in the 2040s they actually couldn't do that because they lacked the sophistication to make such infomercials and they didn't have demonstratio copies of anything that humans wanted to buy into.

Or rather, they did. They seriously could have set up shop in Seoul or Pyongyang and put up signs with tear-off numbers that said:

"Dou you want to be a Hydralisk in REAL LIFE!? It may seem amazing, but MAGIC can make the Amazing a Reality! You can join the OVERMIND as a Hydralisk or even an Ultralisk with only a weeks worth of training in our specially prepared hive zone! Now accepting casting calls to become our brood's very own Kerrigan FOR REAL!!!

We have Magic and this is totally serious. You're a Teran now, but you could be upgraded into an Infested Teran."

People would totally do that. But again, in the 2040s the Invae lacked the cultural sophistication to understand that they could do their thing in plain sight so long as they adhered to specific cultural and philosophical positions. By 2070 they actually know how to pull it off, but they've generated enough bad press already that they have to make their pitch behind closed doors to power brokers who can hide them.

-Frank

I remember reading about that. Boston, wasn't it?

But -- "everyone" knows this because that's what "everyone" has been led to believe, and one domestic event has now calcified mindset. (Other events on international soil, but domestic attitude is what we're dealing with here, and international just doesn't have the same place in popular consciousness.) There's an interesting study about bee-striped stinging insects: we have been so predisposed to being wary of them that it only takes a single sting to calcify a permanent fear of bee-striped stinging insects.

In SR, corporate and government interests have a vested interest in making sure that kind of mindset is very carefully channelled indeed. Fear isn't a problem in and of itself, so long as it's the kind of fear that leads to a respectful hands-off and not the kind that leads to burning out wasp nests. Why would any SR corporation want to encourage the public to make targets of its mages? They're far too valuable!

RL domestic corporate and government interests also channel public opinion, but really have no vested interest in neutralising public dread of a few specific stereotypes in the slightest. With these types, there's no profit in it.

Public opinion twisted by errant media coverage, for any reason, tends to make people who buy into it despite the evidence otherwise seem cartoony. You'd be surprised how often I wonder what bad script writter wrote a Bush speech or a Democratic response. Even normal people can seem like they come from another stereotypical reality.

As a Lawful Evil CEO of Bane, I'd have them all hunted down and brought to me, with only those who work for me being immune to such hunting. When captured, the rogue technomancers would be given mechanical cranial bombs with no electronic components whatsoever, which have an exterior port for re-winding their clockwork timers, though this port only accepts a unique unduplicatable one-of-a-kind key that only I possess and the winding must be performed in an exact sequence that only I know or else the device will explode. On top of that, I'd also give them multiple layers of psychotropic conditioning to make them love me completely and totally as a Saint loves God, as a parent loves a child, and as a lover loves a lover, with such total and complete devotion that they would happily drink the green kool-aid at my whim.
There would also be some bunraku training in there somewhere, but not very much, because I'd already have trouble satisfying my entire mundane bunraku harem.

So will I -- once the corporations begin to understand what they are and how to control them / make them happy. They've already worked it out for the mages.

Well, the answer for keeping mages happy is simple. Give them money. Loads of money. And then, keep them under your leash. That works good, because there is only so few magicians.

However, the corporations want to figure out if they could reproduce Technomancers more easily than say a magician... And some other corporation (specialised in selling matrix products) would rather find out how to neutralize the Technomancers, because they won't be consumers to their products.
That would be truly horrible for them if nobody needed to buy a comlink anymore.

that doesn't mean our fiction has to be stereotypical to keep up.

It wouldn't be a matter of stamina, of course, but a matter of there not being enough hours in a month to fit them all in. It would be like that Chinese Emperor who inspired the creation of a giant water-clock because he needed something to tell him which wife to have sex with when (though this was driven by a precise need to time conception as much as by an overabundance of randy wifes in relation to time.)



I do have an on topic question about the Technomancer menace, however. Is there any canon SR4 info on the Matrix security of the CC's big honkin' space cannons?