User:Birgit bachler/readings2/harkin cyburbia

Introduction:

• Analogy Mr. Black Mrs White on opposing houses, seeing/watching each other, sending signals, changing behavior, introducing Mr Grey and Mrs Pink etc: "What happens to them is exactly what happens to human beings when their relationships are translated into the form of electronic information and funneled along copper wires and wireless channels."

The characters communicate through on/off light-signals, BINARY character, hard to interpret for humans.

• "… millions of us took to spending great tracts of our time hooked up to a vast online information loop - mainly on sites like eBay, Google, Facebook, Second Life and YouTube - populated and governed by ordinary people like ourselves. In doing so we volunteered ourselves to act as human nodes ferrying information back and forth on a vast electronic information loop - and, at least for the time we spent there, we would find ourselves behaving as such." (This is what Harkins defines as CYBURBIA)
• !! Mentioning ANONYMITY "…the momentum of their relationship grows entirely spontaneously and at their own initiative." … "Since they have not been put in touch with each other by any matchmaker, each enjoys a degree of anonymity."(p.8) "…the kind of anonymity forged among peers in Cyburbia is usually rooted in their anonymity." (p.9) "…people find this anonymity liberating… or they want to spend time in a place that allows them to define themselves rather than be defined by others." (p.9) Here a big question mark next to the argument of liberating anonymity and especially the assumption that peer-to-peer architecture prevents from being defined by others, but maybe a great point to start the second chapter.
• CYBURBIA "a network that runs not only on electricity and computing power but on human activity." (p.9)
• "The idea of FEEDBACK helps explain the almost gravitational pull that grips people and pulls them back, again and again into Cyburbia." … "information feedback loops" (p.10?) "If a continuous cycle of messaging and feedback is so important in maintaining a system of communication, then the breakdown of that cycle - as Mr. Black discovers - can often make us ??? and more abrupt in the messages that we send." (p.11?)
• "They [the TIES] stay as weak as they were, while the network grows ever stronger." (p.12?)
• "Plugged into Cyburbia, we combine face-to-face interactions and friendships with loose ties to an electronic diaspora throughout the world."

• >> the communication itself becomes key
• >> we are caught in a feedback-information-loop (when will it ever stop/break?)
• "while the ties we have stay weak as they are the network grows stronger" >> the quality of ties does not change, the quality of the nodes does not change, only the quantity and that is measurable and therefor makes the network bigger/"stronger"

The Loop

• "…. many [people who participated in an experiment not to go online for some time] were at loss as to know what to do with their time." (p.15) they had been "shut out of a communications loop" (p. 16)
• "In this new medium we may still be searching out stories but what we get are other people" … "a pressing need for regular electronic communication with other people." (p. 17)
• NORBERT WIENER: "…the only way to slow society's hurtle towards self-destruction was by harnessing the idea of the continuous information loop of instruction and feedback which was, he felt, the only worthwhile legacy from his research on behalf of the military." … "self-steering engineering devices and human action… feedback loops everywhere." (p.23)
• Wiener: book The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society: "communication and messages were central to an understanding of what is to be human." … "…society is based around the communication of information." (p.26)
• ... "messages between humans, animals and machines were now of the same fundamental nature." (p.27)

Looping the Loop

• Facebook phenomenon: "…recreate cosy student environment" after leaving university
• Ray Pahl, professor of sociology at the University of Essex and an expert on the ties that bind us together: "what most of us would really like is to separate the wheat from the chaff, to keep a small and valued group of friends close while using technology to discreetly manage the demands of the rest." … "Anyone who thinks they've got two hundred friends, has got no friends." (p. 246)
• We Facebookers - "After our initial introduction to the place and its orgy of transient friendships, most of us only want to bother with people at one degree of separation from ourselves." (p. 248)
• "It is not us who benefit from this proliferation of weak ties but the network itself." (p. 248)
• TRUST "Trusting in our electronic peers leaves us vulnerable to those whose opinions are wrong-headed or whose motives are less than benign. The electronic ties we use to send information often spread gossip and misinformation. Our cybernetic habit of rapidly responding to messages and forwarding them on to the information conveyor belt as soon as they arrive can get us into trouble." (p. 250)
• P2P "The peer-to-peer architecture started out as a hippie cri de coeur at the conformism of post-war American life, but the layout of Cyburbia encourages us to conform to the opinion of our electronic peers. An idea designed to help us burrow under the purview of the authorities ends up storing our innermost thoughts on banks of computer servers." (p. 250)
• McLuhan: "Imagining patterns" … "we often end up imagining patterns that are not there."
• WIENER on MESSAGES: "…the exchange of messages was central to understanding society, and that messages sent between humans and between machines were fundamentally the same." …"face-to-face does indeed deliver messages….within a series of visual cues and a broader context that are essential to understanding what we mean."… "…exchange of messages on an information loop is usually less than satisfactory and sometimes never ending." "Just as friendships can not be forged on online social networks alone…. can the flow of information around an electronic loop ever replace real intelligence, strategy or leadership." (p. 251)
• late 60s "hoping that everyone could be put back into direct communication it would raise awareness of our common humanity." (p. 252)
• "Just because we are electronic peers in Cyburbia it does not mean the world is really flat, and does nothing to alleviate inequalities in the real world." (p. 252f)
• "…the really fragile and unpredictable thing is the way that information passes through that loop, which is why it needs to be knitted together with all that feedback." (p. 254)
• "What distinguishes us as humans [from machines] is not that we are capable of cycling through an endless feedback loop but that we can progress with some kind of purpose." (p. 254)
• WIENER "worried that if we relied too heavily on technology we might end up surrendering our sense of purpose and becoming appendages to an electrical machine." (p. 254)
• "The system is certainly self-steering and running on auto-pilot, but only because it has us as automatons." (p. 255)
• "Now we need to spend some time thinking about the message." (p. 256)