Welcome to the digital dystopia

In his new book Cyburbia James Harkin paints a particularly bleak picture of our online world, one in which we are slaves to electronic information and caught in an endless feedback loop. He has posted the introduction on his website.

Here is a taste:

'... no longer content with staring at garish websites on a computer and sending the odd email to our friends, millions of us took to spending vast tracts of our time hooked up to a vast online information loop – mainly on sites like eBay, Google, Facebook, Second Life and YouTube – peopled and governed by ordinary people like ourselves. In doing so, we volunteered ourselves act as human nodes ferrying information back and forth between ourselves on a vast electronic information loop - and, at least for the time we spent there, we would find ourselves behaving as such.'

It's all a bit on the gloomy side but a welcome corrective to those who seem to think texting and video conferencing are adequate substitutes for a chat over coffee.