User:Marlon/peerpressure

Cyburbia: The Dangerous Idea That's Changing How We Live and Who We Are

James Harkin

Chapter: Peer Pressure

James Harkin's Cyburbia links internet to Norbert Wiener's cybernetics. It discusses our present internet culture and how it has transformed the way we live. The chapter Peer Pressure focuses on the effect of our peers in the second coming of the internet. Norbert Wiener envisioned cybernetics a society where we are human nodes firing off messages and adjusting ourselves to feedback in an information loop that never ends.

The internet began as a small collection of static websites, but around the millennium it grew to a web of sites populated by ordinary users. Decentralised file-sharing sites became increasingly popular: peer-to-peer communication without authority. After that came Google, eBay, blogs and finally, social networking sites. Harkin sees this mass migration to social networking communities like Facebook as a social movement. Users sign up to have unmediated, authentic experiences with their online peers, without any need for a government or control.

Cybernetics are evident in the workings of Facebook, as human nodes we are the infrastructure of the social network and our friendships make the connections. Network theorists were right all along, the relationships between people are just as important as those people themselves.

The effects of sharing information peer-to-peer are not necessarily positive, it's power can be used to virally spread falsehoods online. Internet users want to communicate with equals and to have control over what they watch, read and listen to. They spend their free time observing others and exhibiting themselves. Though not always a good thing, it is easy to find like minded people online. But we are still experiencing information through an electronic medium.

At the same time Facebook is mapping the weak ties between internet users, Google has become a map-maker of the relationships between the billion pieces of information found online. It's search engine algorithm PageRank ranks pages by how many hyperlinks exist that point at it. And just by using Google search we help to improve it - like a feedback loop it registers our activity and uses it to determine the best destinations on the web. But it is prone to misuse as 'search engine optimisation firms' buy up links to route traffic in any direction.

This shows that the peer-to-peer network is not without flaws. In traditional media we could rely on cultural taste makers to sift through all the material available to us. Online we depend on our peers and we tend to go around in circles, visiting their favourite links and adding them to our own list. As almost everyone is both a user of and contributor to the content found online, tagging was introduced to attract and direct visitors. In the case of blogging, this has resulted in some mutual back-slapping. It is almost impossible for newcomers to find an audience, as this audience is constantly being send back and forth between veteran blogs.

Research has shown that people tend to like songs better if other people liked them first. So the people who arrived first and their early decisions find themselves in a spiral of continued popularity. Our taste and the decisions we make based on them, depend on other people's earlier selections. A self-perpetuating feedback loop. "What is popular becomes more popular: the online pecking order has been decided awhile ago."