CONNECTIVITY CAN MAKE US FEEL PART OF THE GLOBAL VILLAGE-AND APART FROM IT

THE TIMES NEWSPAPER
JOHANNESBURG, SA
By Barry Ronge
Mar 14, 2009

A couple of columns ago I used the phrase “I’m no Luddite” and I received a sarcastic e-mail that read “Stick to English, will you, or don’t you know that this is an English newspaper? And, anyway, what the hell is a Luddite?”.

If you don’t know about the Luddites, you probably also don’t know that dictionaries exist and that’s why you didn’t just look it up for yourself.

But in the interests of clarity, the Luddites could not be more English.

Their name derives from a supposed activist, Ned Ludd, and his followers, who protested the mechanisation of weaving looms in 1811. Since then, the term “Luddite” has been used derisively to describe anyone opposed to technological progress and change.

I share that bit of idiomatic trivia because I have just been reading Cyburbia, by James Harkin, which comes with the subtitle: “The Dangerous Idea that’s Changing How We Live and Who We Are”. It’s one of those perfectly timed “zeitgeist” tomes that pops up every generation or so.

In the 1950s it was the Beat Generation, which vibed to Kerouac’s On the Road. In the 1960s it was Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media, which gave us the phrase “The medium is the message” and in a later form, “The medium is the massage”. In the 1970s it was Charles A. Reich’s The Greening of America”, and so it goes.

Cyburbia stands very much in that tradition, a trend-detector and analyst of the dominant fads; cell-phones, iPods, video games and, of course, the Internet, where those lines of global communication connect.

Harkin is not an actual Luddite, like some protestor chanting “Two, four, six, eight, Facebook must disintegrate”, but he’s a little worried about the technological impact and the wear and tear of all this instant global communication.

He suggests that we are losing things such as the vibrancy and activity of crowds; that sense of communal action that sometimes occurs in pursuit of some event, sporting or political, or a social cause. Many of the people who once made up those crowds, he suggests, are now at home, hopping from one blog to another, having heated and often inspiring debates with people they cannot see or hear, who could be next door or in the Outer Hebrides. They may all feel that they are being engaged, but that’s not the case at all.

“You might have stared out of your window in suburbia in the 1950s and seen a few people across the street, but now you can stare at millions of other people,” writes Harkin. “The danger is that when you spend all your time deciphering what other people are up to, you never get around to doing something original on your own, because you’re so swamped by opportunities to go into other people’s lives on blogs, social networks and Twitter.”

The technology of cyburbia makes you feel that you are injecting that experience directly into your veins. “People have always been nosy and voyeuristic, but now you can be nosy, not just about the person next door, but about millions of people around the world,” writes Harkin.

But it’s not real. It’s only happening in your head and that’s not always the best place to live. The thing that stopped me from opening a Facebook account was a story in Newsweek, in which one of the journalists opened a Facebook account for a large Idaho potato. By the next day, the potato had 23 friends, but who needs a friend who would make friends with a potato.

Harkin insists, however, that it is good for you. “Being assaulted on so many sides by messaging and feedback makes us more sophisticated and better skilled at multi-tasking,” he says. But, he warns, “if it becomes too overloaded, you crash, and it has the opposite effect: you zone out ”.

It makes stimulating reading, but is also very self-important and full of spontaneous conviction in the author’s vision. That same euphoric enlightenment is what has made books like The Greening of America look so ludicrous in terms of how things really turned out. But Harkin’s book takes a provocative stance. It is very “now”, but I doubt that it will last longer than “now” ever lasts.

There is, however, a critical comment that I found in a blog that seemed appropriate. “The Internet, as it now works, doesn’t necessarily break down the power hierarchy; it just conceals where the power truly lies. Access to so much information is like being deafened by rumours on a street corner; it doesn’t help unless you know which information is good. And if you want to know the quality of the online facts, try a simple test: Google your name.”