Unravelling tangled web to see how it has shaped society

Published on Friday 21 August 2009 20:19

ONE of the things, some sages say, that distinguishes the current economic maelstrom from its predecessors, is the presence of the internet.

The existence of an instantaneous information network, the theory goes, spread panic in the financial world that manifested itself in a massive, simultaneous loss of confidence and a resultant stagnation of markets.

It is a charge James Harkin, the author of Cyburbia a persuasive thesis on how the internet is shaping our society, believes is not wholly accurate: "You can't argue that the internet caused the recession," he contends, ahead of an appearance at the Edinburgh International Book Festival next week.

"There were a lot of deep, systemic factors to do with international debt that caused it.

"What you can say is if you have a lot of traders who sit staring at computer screens and don't do anything else, information spreads almost like a virus."

In Cyburbia, the former futurologist attempts to explain how the web has altered the experience of being human in the 21st century and how traditional institutions have reacted to it.

We are, he contends, blinded to the true significance of the internet by focusing on what appears on its channels. "Take away the content and all we are doing when we play around with these technologies is simply pressing buttons and responding to feedback very quickly," he says. "That is bound to change us – spending more and more time on this information loop."

In tracing our reaction to the internet, he also traces its origins – going back much further than the very visible explosion of online activity that occurred at the tail-end of last century.

"I took it back, not to those self-satisfied entrepreneurs that got lucky in the late 1990s, but to the hippies in America in the 1960s and 70s, who played around with these ideas first," Harkin explains.

"And then I took the idea further back and found its origins in the idea which gave rise to the internet: cybernetics.

"It goes back to the Second World War and a mathematician called Norbert Wiener. He was interested in how to shoot down German bombers. Out of that came a new theory on human nature called cybernetics. Through a series of historical twists and turns it gave rise to or inspired the internet."

Appropriately for a theory connected to the vast, disparate entity that is the internet, cybernetics is a broad subject, based around the science of interacting systems. It is interested in how systems are improved and controlled by the feedback of users.

"Wiener's idea was if human beings were constantly pressing buttons, sending out messages and rapidly responding to feedback, everyone would be better off," Harkin says.

"It turns out, 70 years later, we spend a lot of our time doing that, and we're not necessarily better off."

This view of what the internet has become is shared by many. Shrouded in anonymity, the comments left by many web users suggest it gives rise to a particularly vicious strand of opinion, unburdened by normal societal norms.

"It's a very frustrating experience trying to communicate with anyone on the internet," Harkin says.

"If you are sending e-mail messages to an acquaintance, the circle of messages never seems to end. Unless you get out of a closed feedback loop, communication goes nowhere. It's no form of proper communication, and naturally people are going to get concerned others are not understanding them."

This confusion is not helped, he contends, by the rapid evolution of websites. The constant emergence of newer social networking tools feeds a misunderstanding of the web's role – something traditional institutions are guilty of, he says. "There is massive turbulence, which is why Friendster was overtaken by MySpace, which is overtaken by Facebook, which was to some extent overtaken by Twitter, which might be overtaken by Friendfeed.

"People in charge of established institutions should be wary of simply chasing the latest technological gadgets."

Obsession with the latest fad clouds analysis of the web's significance both among institutions struggling to cope with its influence and the public at large, he says.

But what of the future? Will the turbulence subside to be replaced by a more measured internet? "There are some people who argue that all this stuff is going to disappear and the internet will become a distribution system with about four channels," he explains.

"I don't think that will be the case. Technologies for search will vastly improve, so that sooner or later we might end up beyond Google.

"At that point the whole architecture of the internet changes. That will herald the end of the internet Wild West, and a new kind of place will emerge in which people immediately get to where they want to go."

&#149 James Harkin will appear at the Book Festival on 27 August at 3:30pm. www.edbookfest.co.uk

&#149 Cyburbia: The Dangerous Idea That's Changing How We Live and Who We Are is out now (www.littlebrown.co.uk)