In Gibson's Iduro tabloids are taken to a new level, facilitated by technology, by the company Slitscan. Slitscan is a large-scale, twenty-four hour television show that is its own network and is dedicated to bringing celebrities down using hardcore smut. The show is worldwide and very popular and, thus, very effective. Slitscan also uses technology to find information, or rather dirt, on celebrities that is more factually based than its predecessors of the twentieth century who usually spread false information. .
The setting of the book is a very technologically advanced twenty-first century Tokyo. Everything is connected through the Internet. This fact alone allows someone with the right connections access to almost any kind of information. Since the company (Slitscan) is so large, it has these connections. Slitscan has a large team of scientists and researchers who use their Internet "connections" to access computer databases about people's lives. The databases contain information ranging from what someone buys to whom they talked to on the phone. They are very dedicated to this art of finding celebrity sleaze. They look at the information in the databases searching for patterns that might lead to something interesting and noteworthy, something worth talking about on the show. Colin Laney, one of the main characters who was previously an employee of Slitscan "was an intuitive fisher of patterns of information"(31). He possessed "a medically documented concentration deficit" which he used to reach a state of "pathological hyperfocus" where he could recognize the information patterns(30). They look for links to anybody with any degree of fame, which is fairly easy considering that so many people are famous. Laney's former boss, Kathy Torrence stated ""Nobody's really famous anymore", "I mean really famous. There's just not much fame left, not in the old sense. Not enough to go around""(6).
