Cyburbia: The Dangerous Idea That's Changing How We Live And Who We Are;
By James Harkin; Hachette;
Pages: 288; Price: Rs 495
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‘Impatience is the new life’, the punch line of the latest campaign by a leading telecom player aptly summarises the preferences of the new generation. With technology penetrating deep into every aspect of our lives, sometimes we do not even notice its presence. Mobile phones, social networking sites, search engines are so ubiquitous it almost appears as if life descended on Earth with them! But many of us do not know that Information and Communications Technology (ICT) took more than 70 years to arrive where it stands today. While it may look as if technology affecting social evolution is a one-way street, there is a long history of social influence on technological evolution as well. And that’s the core subject that James Harkin’s Cyburbia.
James Harkin’s Cyburbia is juxtaposed on the theme of suburbia, the most visible development in the Western world during the early 20th century, when populations started migrating from cities to the outskirts, popularly known as suburbs. The development of new transportation technologies, which enabled people to connect their work-life in cities to their homes in suburbs, catalysed this. Cyburbia is this century’s ‘suburbia’, enabled by the development of ICT, and that’s where people are migrating in hordes. It’s a virtual world, which seems to be real in terms of what it offers and how it affects large segments of the human population.
But all this did not come from nowhere and was not built up in one day. Cyburbia puts this society-technology mash-up into perspective by chalking out the last 70 years of its making and how we arrived where we are today.
Harkins has built upon three fundamental pillars. The first one is ‘Cybernetics’, a concept propounded by Norbert Wiener. Taking cues from military warfare where men and machines need to be in a continuous information loop of instructions and feedback, Weiner saw messages as the key defining factor in the evolution of the human race. These messages when pulled into a continuous information loop, he thought will enable the society to correct its own errors, adjust to changes and hence evolve.
The second pillar is that of a social phenomenon in the late 1960s, an era synonymous with radical politics, riots, barricades and that of youthful self-expression against authority. There was a clear rejection of bureaucratic hierarchy and authority, a so-called ‘hippie’ culture built on ‘authentic peer-to-peer communication’. Known as the New Left, they had disdain for both the military industrialised bureaucracies of the West and the fossilised communist governments of the Soviet bloc. Prominently based out of California, this movement had a deep impact on the new media of that period and many of the activists then were later seen spending time with building and running computers.
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 James Harkin is a writer and social forecaster. He was born in Belfast, and is now a regular writer for The Financial Times and The Guardian as well as director of talks at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. Between 1996 and 1999, he taught social and political theory at the University of Oxford, after which he worked as a social forecaster for various agencies and think-tanks.
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The third pillar is the network theory, which covers the connections of people, ideas, machines and the general laws, which govern this network of connections. This world seems to be a small place when viewed from a network perspective, where each person can be linked to any other through a mere six degrees of separation. And the power of a network does not depend on number of nodes but on the number of connections between these nodes, the number of relationships and their intensity. These underlying and defining laws of network theory seem to be vital to understanding human evolution — ‘who you know’ becoming at least as important as ‘what you did’. The book also provides a deep spiritual perspective to the domain of network theory ‘where a network is seen as a bigger mind’ enabled by electronic connections.
Through the last seven decades, since the 1940s, Weiner’s cybernetics idea about the centrality of messages has travelled far, soaring upwards from the military-industrial establishment to the counter culture and from there into the business world and the rest of society.
But, has all been achieved as envisaged in the idea of cybernetics, peer connections and network as a ‘bigger mind’? ‘Probably not’ as the later half of the book reveals. What was conceived over the decades as ‘a global giant network — strictly egalitarian, perfectly self-organising and utterly free from authority’ has resulted into something else. And that is where lies ‘the dangerous idea that’s changing how we live and who we are’ states the book. Based on series of research studies conducted in this space, the book demonstrates how the need for ‘authentic peer communications’ has been replaced by ‘peer pressure’, where the views of those who come early, dominates. Be it product rating, or a popular vote; once a ranking sets in, others simply follow. So, the most popular book is rated further as the most popular by more respondents. And there exist similar challenges in terms of malicious intent being expressed and information overload not allowing people to do much beyond just being part of the (information) loop.
Cyburbia covers the entire paradigm of how different aspects of technology, social and political movement and networking have evolved over the last seventy years to build what we see today. The book completes the loop by covering extensively how some of those initial tenets and goals have not been achieved.
The aspect that the book brings out is that one has probably never seen this space from a lens, which is ‘not business’. The attempt of the book to provide a well-researched, multifaceted, integrated presentation of the evolution of Cyburbia is quite interesting.
Where the book probably loses out is that its entire background has the Western world in mind, with no connection to the fast developing societies of nations like China and India. The social context, in which the development of Cyburbia is embedded, can only be partially related to our world. There is much more, which could probably be analyzed when seen from the eyes of Chinese and Indian netizens.
Overall, a very interesting book, which should appeal to anyone, who has been wondering where the ‘big mind’ came from and what is it that they should know before they do something ‘with it’.
Kapil Dev Singh is SVP and Country Manager with IDC (India).
A version of this review was published in Businessworld issue dated 20 July 2009
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