Cyburbia: Book review

<img src='http://larvatusprodeo.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/9781408701133.jpg' align=left There’s obviously a perception in the publishing and bookselling industries that James Harkin’s Cyburbia is going to sell well – as you can barely walk into a bookstore at the moment without falling over it. The subtitle – “The Dangerous Idea That’s Changing How We Live and Who We Are” – sounds like a bit of hype (and perhaps Harkin should have noted how long and didactic subtitles are themselves a search engine optimisation thing), and my expectations weren’t necessarily high, but I thought it was worth taking a look at because of my personal and professional interests in the topic.

Harkin is “Director of Talks” at the Institute for Contemporary Art in London, which sounds like a fabulous job. He writes regularly for a number of publications – including The Guardian – and Cyburbia is an expansion of his shorter pieces on the history and social significance of the internet. Harkin is also one of the burgeoning tribe of “Big Ideas” interpreters and entrepreneurs. This, combined with his journalistic skills, has both advantages and disadvantages for Cyburbia.

On the positive side of the ledger, Harkin writes well and rather impressively sustains a few themes throughout what might otherwise be a rather discursive and diffuse book. But, less promisingly, his style of pop sociology – like a lot of efforts in this vein (think Hugh Mackay and Bernard Salt, though he’s better than that) – is prone to generalisations unsupported by empirical evidence and unsurprisingly close to the common sense of the commentariat.

Harkin opens with a rather striking parable summoning up the image of people staring at each other from the windows on a suburban street, and attempting to communicate by various forms of signalling. It’s rather creepy, and sexualised, and that’s no doubt intended. This is Cyburbia, where we’ve apparently all moved, and where the medium is the message and the mere act of voyeuristically “communicating” drives out both content and interaction. It’s like poking celebrities on Facebook (and Harkin apparently directed his first ever poke at Christina Ricci), or like random voyeurism on social media sites.

There’s a couple of problems (at least) with this image and this theme. The first is that the analytical frame Harkin adopts is the same one that inspired some of the intellectual and conceptual steps in the development of the internet – cybernetics, systems theory, information theory, social network theory, and so on. All privileged the fact of interaction, if you like, over the content of messages. There’s actually a fascinating story to tell here, which goes far beyond the origins of digital technology in World War II (though that’s interesting too). Harkin tells it well, bringing folks like Norbert Wiener and Marshall McLuhan to life. The sections where he looks beneath the technology to get at the social and human worldview of its pioneers are the best in the book. It’s a bit derivative, and both Charlie Gere’s Digital Culture and N. Katherine Hayles’ How We Became Posthuman are much richer tellings of the same story, but as a popularisation of an intriguing compendium of intellectual history and cultural contexts, it’s very worthwhile.

But therein lies the rub. While he might be having fun slaying some of the more hyperbolic dragons of social network theory (demolishing various versions of the “six degrees of separation” thesis), he’s both ignoring more nuanced articulations of the perspectives he takes aim at and taking the received interpretation at its own estimation. He seems to assume that because the creation of online networks treats people as nodes – an analogy used by no less than Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg – that’s what we are when we’re sitting in front of a screen.

But we’re not, or not to the same degree that Harkin thinks we are.

Taking Facebook as a bit of a test case, as Harkin himself does, there’s a growing amount of empirical research on why people do various things at FB, and what motivates them. The consensus of the literature is that Facebook represents a “scaling up” of already existing networks, and that most people don’t make the distinction between “offline” and “online” that almost all the critique assumes as a given. Nor are the majority of users treating Facebook as a huge pond where they can swim around randomly poking or checking out others – it’s actually used far more for “social searching” (ie deepening one’s knowledge of existing connections) than “social browsing” (finding new connections). In addition, it’s increasingly being employed for coordinating everything from social lives to community events and political activism. And for “social distribution” – utilising Facebook as a platform for embedding and sharing content derived from elsewhere, as well as for content creation.

None of this is to suggest that Facebook is perfect or to echo some of the more hyperbolic claims of cyber-utopians. But it does go to the way that that Facebook is becoming something of a term of art for a particular set of practices, much as “googling” has passed into common parlance. The academic research that’s been done shows that social media sites and social networking deepen and extend existing forms of social behaviour, all of which is by definition rich in content and meaning. While Harkin’s book has some not inconsiderable virtues, it’s a real pity that he didn’t go in search of what evidence there is about what people are actually doing when they interact on the internet, rather than flip around some of the assumptions made by its progenitors.