Review: Cyburbia by James Harkin

Review: Cyburbia by James Harkin

What do you, sitting in front of your computer, responding to an endless stream of updates on Facebook and Twitter, have in common with an anti-aircraft gunner, ceaselessly moving the sights to try and anticipate the zig-zagging path of an aircraft trying to bomb you? The answer for James Harkin is cybernetics, the discipline founded in the 1940s by the engineer Norbert Wiener.

In either situation you are receiving information and immediately responding to it: data in, control signals out. Wiener saw that the gunner was functioning as part of a system, a stream of information: gunner aims at the plane, plane takes evasive action to avoid the bullets, gunner watches the plane's trajectory shift, gunner re-aims at the plane. The pilot too is in a similar position, constantly trying to predict the gunner's aim and avoid it. A similar state of affairs exists in someone playing a video game - where often you are trying to shoot something or avoid something. And for Harkin much of modern life is like this, a ceaseless flow of information to which we must respond instantly. (Or must we? We feel we must, at least.)

Connected to cybernetics is the study of networks, where researchers focus on the connections between people, rather than the people themselves. This begins with Stanley Milgram's Six Degrees of Separation experiment (which was mostly faked), and Harkin links it to hippy entrepreneur Stewart Brand, founder of the Whole Earth Catalogue, as well as to Shawn Fanning, founder of Napster, to Facebook, and its use by intelligence agencies trying to understand terrorist organisations.

In the past decade the military has seen great value in this, aiming to equip every soldier with communications devices able to talk to their peers, to spread information widely, share their positions, and coordinate. In practice, as in the Israeli attacks on Lebanon in 2006, this has not always worked - soldiers uncertain of their objectives, too busy keeping up with their networks to pursue their actual battlefield targets. How similar to the workplace of many of us in more mundane jobs.

Cybernetics is all about feedback. There are two types of feedback. Negative feedback tends to restore a system to equilibrium; Wiener feared the world falling into chaos (as did his fan Marshall McLuhan) and saw cybernetics as allowing feedback to restore it to a stable condition. The other type is positive feedback which despite its name tends to be destructive: this is the feedback of a microphone and amplifier, or of a nuclear reactor undergoing a runaway reaction, where the output feeds into the input and multiplies - internet gossip can be another destructive example of this.

For harkin, we all live in the world of "cyburbia", which seems to draw on 1950s sociology that portrayed suburbia as a place of conformity where everyone spies on everyone else - the internet allows us to watch and follow each other (and he reports on experiments like allowing people to watch CCTV feeds from their housing estates). Governments try to use social networks to combat terrorism, but modern terrorists are not organised in a tight structure. They use networks to try and organise their soldiers, with similarly unsuccessful results. In cybernetics, feedback offers a choice between stasis and runaway out-of-control processes. This isn't enough to live our lives by.

Harkin worked with filmmaker Adam Curtis on his series The Trap, and there is something of the same voice to this book. It is easy to read, prone to sweeping statements but with an undercurrent of cynicism rather than the customary Wired-style evangelism about Web 2.0, Facebook, or peer-to-peer networking. There are detailed discussion of 1960s hippydom and recent American and Israeli military thinking, amongst other areas. There is little technical discussion of cybernetics which is perhaps a weakness. And while it is good at attacking the pretentions of modern Web 2.0 enthusiasts it offers little positive in itself.

The mobile phone company T-Mobile has started in Britain offering promotions to customers with more than 50 friends. Yet the book comments on a survey of Blackberry users which found that the principal function of the device is less to keep in contact with friends than to preserve a distance from acquaintances. Harkin not T-Mobile shows the direction communications companies should be heading. If you're already suspicious of where we're going with information overload, rapid tic-like responses to email, and addiction to Facebook, Harkin will provide ammunition, and if you're still an enthusiast it might cause some thinking. Thought which can only be done away from the internet.