User:Andre Castro/Annotation/Cyburbia

Cyburbia

In the chapters The Network Effect and Peer Pressure from James Harkin's book Cyburbia the author begins by tracing the history of the development of internet from its initial concepts to its current form, and follows it by offering a critical analysis of the current state-of-affairs of the internet.

Harkin traces the beginning of what will become the internet to 1970's and the end of the the hippie communities. The individual that came out of this experience of community living, widely inspired by the Nobert Wiener's vision of cybernetics, became involved in the emergent computer industry and saw in electronic communication a possibility for global scale communicating unmediated by the authorities.

The 1980's and early 1990's witnessed the dissemination of the computer and birth of a new economy 'thoroughly networked and constantly adjusting to the feedbacks of its suppliers and consumers […] powered by computers and electronic network devices' (pp.81).

In the 1990's the network effect became a reality, when began to be applied to(or by) communication technology, and the information-highway infrastructure was already reality that allowed access to the internet. Under this scenario Tim Berners-Lee created the world wide web, opening doors for online information to be browsed. At the same time critical voices were also showing their discontentment based on the internet being seen only as a successor of television, remaining a one-way communication medium, rather than achieving a true network effect. Cybernetics' enthusiasts wanted to turn the metaphor into reality and users wanted to be more than receivers in the information loop, but 'to render us capable of forging connections and passing information back and forth between those connections with all the ease and rapidity of nodes on a network'(p.93).

The 2000's witness the second life of the internet with the appearance of Napster, Google search, Ebay, Facebook, among others. These social media made possible for great numbers of people to be together online and create a permanent exchange of information, which seemed to circumvent any kind of authority. Harkin's describes this movement as a migration to Cyburbia (pp. 100). Wiener's cybernetic vision was fully realized 'as armies of human nodes queued up to send and receive a constant stream of messages from their electronic ties, they unknowingly become the infrastructure and the backbone of a new kind of network or continuous information loop'(p.101).

This historical cartography of the internet development is followed by a critical analysis in which the author points out that although succeeding in allowing anyone to be in the information loop, we ended up in a 'vast electronic suburb, in which was little to do but spend vast amount of time chattering and looking at ordinary's people's life'(p.111). And information might escape authority control, but it comes with its own biases. Examples of this can be seen in the cyclic (or spiraling) dynamics, promoted by Google search engine - PageRank - that prioritizes information based on the number of hints; or on the fact that it promotes mostly encounters of like-minded people, rather than with those who might challenge us. [Rather than diversity these examples show a promotion of information funneling and hierarchies].

'Our new home in Cyburbia was a stranger place that those early cybernetic believers could ever have imagined. New arrivals had been promised a world of equality, but as soon as they discovered that some were a good deal more equal than others'(pp. 124-125).

Title Cyburbia: the dangerous idea that's changing how we live and who we are Author James Harkin Publisher Little, Brown, 2009