BOOK OF THE DAY: ALAN O'RIORDANreviews Cyburbiaby James Harkin Little, Brown 274pp, £17.99
JUST AS a mass migration to a place called suburbia was made possible by technological advancements (the train and the car), so, too, is another mass movement, to a virtual world called cyburbia, made possible by personal computers and broadband internet. Cyburbia is certainly worthy of a sociologist’s attention. It has its own codes of manner and social interaction, it changes the way in which we think, and gives us habits that can have effects far beyond our online lives.
It is unfortunate then that James Harkin spends so long being an historian rather than a sociologist. His book becomes a useful primer on the origins of cybernetics, but tells a tale by now familiar to many. Tracing the long road to cyburbia, Harkin takes us to the second World War and Norbert Wiener, often cited as an unsung hero of the information age. Working on anti-aircraft systems, Wiener imagined the gunner as part of a loop, reacting to a continuous feed of information about the pilot’s movements and his own line of fire. It was his study of such systems which led him to coin the word cybernetics, from the Greek kybernetes, or pilot.
Armed with such a metaphor, Harkin is never slow to use it. He describes the mouse, computer games and the way we love to be in the loop, constantly checking BlackBerrys and so on, as proof of Wiener’s perspicacity. Harkin notes himself that man is above all “a talking animal”. But constantly updating and reacting to information in any environment could apply to driving a car, or even to being alive, as much as it does to being online.
That said, Harkin is probably right to emphasise the idea of the loop; it is a fruitful way of understanding how we operate as nodes within systems of constant messaging, whether at work at our desks or at play in places such as Facebook and Twitter.
Like Marshall McLuhan, Harkin knows that the medium is the message. (This is just as well given most of the content on the internet: the superficiality of Facebook; the embittered biases of bloggers; the moronic message boards.) As he notes, “we can expect that the time we spend ceaselessly passing information back and forth between our electronic ties might also reverberate through our culture”. Harkin is thorough on such effects: the tendency to trust peers over experts; how constant reaction to multiple messages erodes concentration yet fosters agile thought; spontaneous terrorist cells; changing narratives in popular culture; and the rise of networked individualism (by which I think is meant that a loose network of sad cases and misfits will always be found to share your virtual, postmodern garret).
Any of these would be worthy of a book, but Harkin, rather like his subject, is more expansive that incisive. His analysis lacks new insights. What he tells us of, say, the changed nature of reading, with books ceasing to be objects in their own right, but merely parts of a stream called literature, with meanings that exist between texts, goes back to Ferdinand de Saussures's 1906 Cours de linguistique générale, the theories of Mikhail Bakhtin and the synthesis of both by Julia Kristeva and Roland Barthes in the 1960s – not a blogger among them.
Harkin is further sidelined on the moot point of the hippie origins of peer-to-peer communication: the dream of a flow of information without hierarchies. This at least leads him to his strong suit: an analysis of how those high hopes ironically ended up in the conservative, gossipy online suburbia we have today. His final wake-up call is stirring, however. The architecture of cyburbia is here to stay, but we need to realise that without knowledge, information is useless; without thinking outside the loop, we lose sight of why it’s useful in the first place.
Alan O’Riordan is a freelance journalist