Opinion - News Analysis   

We need real evidence about cyberspace

James Harkin

Our celebration of the virtual world must be balanced by research into its psychological effects.

A HUNDRED visitors to an Internet chatroom last month witnessed an English father of two hang himself in front of his webcam. Some of Kevin Whitrick's fellow chatters must have imagined he was play-acting, but others were happy to goad him into killing himself. As Whitrick's face turned purple and he began to die, one chatter punctured the heady atmosphere by wondering: "Is this real?"

Whitrick's final moments tell us something important about what the Internet has become.

In the course of the last decade, many of us have quit watching the box in the corner of the room and turned to fiddling around with gadgets through which we can watch each other instead. The web has morphed into a vast virtual suburbia to which many of us have retired to stare idly at each other's lives. To Internet geeks this is known as "peer-to-peer" communication or "Web 2.0"; the rest of us could just as easily call it cyburbia.

For millions, this online culture is the only culture that matters. Websites such as YouTube and MySpace have become pleasure parks through which almost every kind of human experience can be funnelled.

We have heard a great deal about this exciting explosion of creativity. Small wonder, then, that the marketers, venture capitalists, and media behemoths are piling into cyberspace to exploit this orgy of self-expression. Thus far, however, the sociologists and social critics have been notable only for their absence. What about the psychological effects of constant watching and being watched? From the people who Google themselves and lovers obsessively, to those who stare at strangers on a webcam, there is good evidence that our time spent in cyburbia is less about "social networking" than about an obsessive desire to see and be seen. When we stare out the window on to cyburbia, what we see is a place that thrives on feverish rumour, populated by voyeurs, exhibitionists, amateur enthusiasts, and even trainee terrorists.

Our celebration of life in cyburbia needs to be balanced with serious social investigation of what happens to people who spend so much time there, and what it says about our society that they should want to. Why has there not been one? The reason is that many of us have so much invested in Web 2.0 that we have hurled our critical faculties out the window.

The danger of life in cyburbia is that we don't really get to know our neighbours. We risk huddling into small tribes defined by prejudices, urged on by the rhetorical anger of those who are never sure whether what they are so urgently participating in is entirely for real.

- Guardian Newspapers Limited 2007

(James Harkin was associate producer of the BBC2 series The Trap: Whatever Happened To Our Dream of Freedom?)

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Stories in this Section

Politics of immaturity
Industrial corridor, a test case
The fringe and the mainstream
Chequebook journalism and the hostages
World poverty reduced by growth in India and China
We need real evidence about cyberspace
IMF's plutocracy
Corrections and Clarifications
Rahul's remarks
Et tu?
Gere-Shilpa issue

Copyright © 2007, The Hindu. Republication or redissemination of the contents of this screen are expressly prohibited without the written consent of The Hindu