In December 20 last year, a Boeing 737 preparing for take-off in Colorado
skidded off the runway, tumbled into a ravine and injured 38 people. Just
moments after the accident, while his fellow passengers sat reflecting on
their good fortune to be alive, Mike Wilson knew what to do. “Holy f-ing
shit,” he messaged his electronic acquaintances on his iPhone. “I was just
in a plane crash!”
The stereotypical response for anyone who survived airplane crash used to be
to reach for a cigarette, even if he or she didn't smoke. Then came the
mobile phone and the opportunity to phone or text our loved ones. What
Wilson did, however, was something very different; using an application
called Twitter, he sent a series of thoughts - each of 140 characters or
less - to a network of hundreds of thousands of people around the world.
Twitter is the latest social networking craze to have won over the ageing
mainstream media, and using it is like sending out a universal text message
to the whole planet, or to whoever wants to listen. For many, this orgy of
technology-enhanced wittering is simply something that we indulge in during
our spare time at home, in the office or in transit, but it's not without
its uses. Veteran Twitterers report its usefulness as a way of soliciting
advice, assistance or directions; only this week Lance Armstrong, the
cycling legend, turned to the Twitterati to post an appeal for his stolen
bike. Celebrity users such as Jonathan Ross relish it because it allows them
to forge a more direct dialogue with their viewing public, often to the
quiet irritation of those in charge of their public image.
Twitter's coming of age, however, is generally dated to the Mumbai terror
attacks at the end of November, when minute-by-minute updates of the
unfolding chaos zipped around the world by eye-witnesses armed with Twitter
on their laptops and mobile phones. It was given another fillip on the
geopolitical stage in January, when the Israeli Government used Twitter to
snipe at the mainstream media and get across its reasons for invading Gaza.
Evidence of Twitter's cultural impact and its exponential rise in popularity
are easy to find but discovering why anyone should want to dedicate time
informing everyone in the world what he or she is up to at any given moment
is harder to fathom. The answer, though, lies in the idea of “being in the
loop”.
To most of us, the phrase means no more than being “in the know”, privy to
information known only to a privileged inner circle; to be cut out of the
loop, by contrast, was to be distanced from your colleagues and excluded
from a hallowed circle of power. The idea of being “in the loop”, however,
is older than you think. It can be traced back 70 years to an idea called
cybernetics, whose progenitors imagined was the perfect human society - one
that would see us all hitched to an electronic information loop defined by a
continuous cycle of messaging and feedback among all those involved in it.
Writing in the dark shadow of the Holocaust, Norbert Weiner, the American
mathematician and father of cybernetics, convinced himself that society was
in danger of spiralling out of control; and that only by putting us into
constant touch with each other could he prevent it from careering towards
collapse.
From there the idea passed to the media guru Marshall McLuhan in Toronto, who
predicted as early as the 1960s that a whirring electronic information loop
was going to shake modern society to its foundations, tying everyone and
everything together in a “new electronic interdependence”. The impact of
this electronic information loop coursing through all our veins, McLuhan
thought, could only enhance our ability to understand one another. It would,
he felt sure, precipitate the rise of a “global village” and a new era of
greater responsibility and understanding.
In the late 1960s, the same idea was borrowed by some hippie veterans of the
counter-culture from the San Francisco Bay area to fill the vacuum left by
their radical politics. Bohemians of the counter-culture such as Stewart
Brand saw in cybernetics a means of routing information around the control
of the authorities and putting ordinary people back into direct
communication with each other. Those hippies slowly morphed into
electro-hippies, and many of them went on to become instrumental in the
development of the computer industry and the internet in the 1970s and
1980s. Only after the collapse of the dot-com boom, however, when the huge
fibre-optic information cables that had been laid in the ground to give us
lightning new broadband connections to the net were abandoned by the
companies that had built them, did ordinary people show any interest in
spending time on online social networks. Over the past seven years, millions
of us have quietly migrated to a vast electronic suburb to spend vast tracts
of our time messaging and responding to a constant stream of information
from our electronic ties. When we inhabitants of Cyburbia return there
compulsively to check for updates, we are not only trying to be more
efficient and more productive, but to ward off a persistent fear of falling
out of the loop.
WhenTwitter put this global information loop in our pockets, the site became
the apotheosis of the cybernetic idea. Now that the information loop is
fully built, however, the sometimes fanciful prognostications of the gurus
of cybernetics have failed to materialise. Instead, like a giant online
video game, we are confronted with a continuous information loop that
demands our rapid response to everyone we know and to many that we don't.
Stories of our attachment to it are not difficult to find - of people firing
off rude or insulting e-mails without allowing themselves time to think, for
example, or of people using whole evenings chatting or flirting with many
different strangers at the same time, or of people staying up late at night
to bid against each other on eBay. Sometimes the pressure of that stream of
information is literally breathtaking. In March last year, The American
Journal of Psychiatry took account of some of this international evidence to
announce that it had added “internet addiction” - people's excessive use of
the net followed by anguished withdrawal - to its list of mental disorders.
Even though the stream of information that comes from our myriad ties is
much more pressing than other kinds of media, however, it is not very
helpful to think of users of electronic media as addicts. The best way to
imagine all this is as the corollary of a new kind of self that many of us
now inhabit - one whom craves being in the information loop via e-mail, text
message and online networks at all times, and whom is continually opening
that information loop and then vainly trying to slam it shut by firing rapid
bursts of feedback. This new kind of involvement that we have with our
electronic media is much more intense and more pressing than even McLuhan
could have imagined. If watching TV was the media equivalent of being
stoned, life in Cyburbia often seems like the crack cocaine version.
Today's breathless internet gurus would have you believe that all this makes
us and our organisations more agile, more efficient and more responsive. Not
necessarily. The delivery of a continuous stream of messages might well be
slowly stretching our brains, turning us into creatures who are better at
doing many different things at once. Preliminary studies from
neuroscientists and psychologists, however, suggest that in the meantime our
brains are likely to become strained and confused if we make too many
demands on them. Beyond a certain point, in other words, the productivity
bonus that we get from responding to many different streams of information
on our information loop at the same time levels off, and begins to slow us
down. No matter - many of us enjoy it all the same. The reason why we're so
keen to switch through a range of information streams and constantly jump
around between them, in any case, is not at all about doing things more
efficiently - it is simply that we have come to appreciate being in the loop
for its own sake.
When McLuhan argued that "the medium is the message" nearly half a
century ago, he meant that the content of a medium is often less important
than the difference it makes in us just to have it around. It was a good
point, but McLuhan didn't live long enough to see his aphorism twisted
around. The world we now inhabit is one in which messages are rapidly
becoming the medium - electronic messages sent back and forth between us at
breakneck speed on a never-ending electronic information loop. During his
darker moments, he seemed to have an inkling of where all this might lead.
The coming global electronic village, he feared, might not give rise not to
a village-like harmony after all but precipitate a new kind of voyeurism.
The danger, he once announced, was that that we would emerge into “a world
in which you don't necessarily have harmony but an extreme concern with
everyone else's business, and much involvement in everybody else's life”.
The medium he chose to deliver that particular message through was television,
but if he were alive today, he would have delivered it via a tweet.
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James Harkin is the author of Cyburbia: The Dangerous Idea That's Changing
How We Live and Who We Are.
www.cyburbia.tv
