Jonas Lund Annotation-Cyburbia

Outline: Write an annotation of the ‘Peer Pressure’ chapter of Cyburbia by James Harkin on maximum 500 words.

Annotation

James Harkin (2009), writes in Cyburbia, how we moved from a top level content distribution model towards a peer to peer one, over the course of the last 20 years. He explains and illustrates, in an often generalizing manner, some of the consequences, advantages and pitfalls of the new social content distribution model.

In the early times of the world wide web, Harkin (2009) describes the information flow as being one directional, “the information highway”, in the sense that a viewer can only consume the information – there was no platform for interaction. This slowly changed in the years following the ‘burst of the IT bubble’, the web became a platform for self directed content creation and social interaction.

Harkin (2009) explains the development of the social networks by shortly outlining the background of peer to peer networks, steaming from an area of Napster, through smaller peer to peer exchange sites to an array of different social networking sites, such as Friendster, Myspace, Youtube, Twitter and lastly Facebook.

As a result of online content being propagated through the means of tagging with keywords, the similarity and likemindedness of the information discovered can have unnerving effects, illustrated in the text by two examples; The ‘pro-ana’ movement, in which teenagers whom are pro anorexia come together to exchange useful tips how to maintain an anorexic lifestyle and by the recent Finnish school shootings where the perpetrator had clear connections to other like minded individuals across the Atlantic.

People tend to prefer what others in their surrounding find likable, a peer review system largely influenced by Google’s search algorithm, PageRank. It became evident that most content consumed online was created by a small percentage of the online communities. Recent discoveries by Yahoo Research, shows that 50% of consumed tweets on twitter originates from 20.000 (0.05%) of its users (Wu, Hofman, Mason, Watts, 2011). The consequence of this explains Harkin is that we “tend to get stuck in a self-perpetuating feedback loop” (2009, p.124) as we look to our peers for online direction.

References
Harkin J., 2009, Cyburbia, Little, Brown

Wu, S. Hofman, J.M.; Mason, W.A.; Watts, D.J., (2011), Who Says What to Whom on Twitter, Yahoo Research

Research strands

1. "Personalised" Content Distribution == Personalised Algorithms, Search.
2. The Trap, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (background)
3. http://www.amazon.com/How-Became-Posthuman-Cybernetics-Informatics/dp/0226321460