The Screen as Portal to the Real

Everyone always comes back to that first line from Neuromancer: "The Sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." The line is so compelling that Bono gets to read it aloud in No Maps for These Territories.

What is it about the screen, even devoid of sensible data, that makes it so watchable?

There's something to discern there, whether it's the voices of dead people in Poltergeist or -- wait -- the voices of dead people in White Noise. Static has to mean something, either as a metaphor or as a code (think of electronic voice phenomenon). The screen acts as a portal to other sentiences, whether they're frighteningly never-living (e.g., AIs in films like War Games) or entities that are more living than we are (e.g., an Outside that is the Real in The Matrix). Neuromancer's first line seems to toy with our curiosity about the permeable dead space of the screen. Yes, we're interested in the lives of the characters in the real world of the novel, but aren't we more curious to have the digital world rendered visible?