Watch out Cyburbia has arrived

A good review of James Harkin's book Cyburbia appears on the register-Ht-Alfie Dennen in which the author has according to the review

produced the first proper full-length critique of Web 2.0 - tracing the daftness back to the cybernetics pioneers of the 1940s.

The piece contains a question and answer piece with Harkin who tells us that

The central image of the book is Cyburbia, this strange alternate world where we watch each other and the minutiae of each others' lives.

and

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. 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 onto other people's lives on blogs, social networks and Twitter.

shades of the front of yesterday's Daily Mail front page perhaps.

Steven Poole reviewed the book in the Guardian on Saturday and began by saying that

When you're just a node on the network, no one can hear you scream. James Harkin's dystopian essay portrays users of Facebook et al as people staring out of their windows on a suburban street, signalling to one another by flashing lamps on and off. The only winner is the disembodied "system", which passes information around itself to no scrutable purpose, using us as its automata.