Our new home Cyburbia
James Harkin, lead programmer of the Feedback season discusses the roots of our feedback culture in cybernetic experiments of the 1940s and makes the case for the new messages our new media need.
What does feedback mean? When we think about the word today, we are reminded of all those forms we are asked by to fill in when we sample products or services. The idea, however, goes back much further than that. Feedback is simply information which is fed back into any system in instantaneous response to information which comes out of it, and an information feedback loop is the arrangement which makes that possible.
The idea of feedback, and the idea that of being "in the loop" is often traced to the 1970s, but it goes back much further than that. In fact it was the invention of a pioneering mathematician called Norbert Wiener back in the 1940s who, drafted into the war effort, was looking for a better and more efficient way of shooting down German bombers. What Wiener arrived at was nothing less than a whole new philosophy of what it is to be human - and a new science called cybernetics.
In the seventy years since he invented it, this science of cybernetics - the idea that we humans are essentially messengers who exist on an endless loop of instruction and feedback - has gone on to become much more influential than even Wiener imagined. It helped that the idea was borrowed by hippie veterans of the counter-culture in the late 1960s and early 1970s, who saw in it a means of burrowing under the rigid hierarchies of American society.
At the same time, it excited curiosity among artists and bohemians. One of the most talked about exhibitions in London in 1968 was called Cybernetic Serendipity, and was held at the ICA. The exhibition sought to understand how cybernetics could reinvent poetry, dance, sculpture and animation, and featured a range of amateur cybernetic devices capable of responding to feedback from the audience. So popular was the exhibition that the organisers were forced to extend its run.
To some extent, that idea of cybernetics has now become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The fact that many of us had grown up playing computer and video games, nimbly pressing buttons and adjusting ourselves to a constant stream of information to control the game, is one way in which many of us become attuned to a world defined by rapid response to electronic feedback via a continuous loop of electronic information. Then there was the explosion of text messaging and emails in the late-1990s, further evidence of an insatiable appetite for chatter with an extended network of electronic ties.
Those cybernetic information loops, however, were only played out within an extended circle of friends, and were only electronic potty training for what lay ahead. Only when huge digital throngs of people spontaneously arrived to crack open that information loop and add themselves as nodes on online social networks was Wiener's cybernetic vision fully realised. As armies of human nodes queued up to send and receive a constant stream of messages from their electronic ties, they unknowingly become the infrastructure and the backbone of a new kind of network or continuous information loop. Information still had to be sent over a computer network rooted in technology and wire cables, but the most important kind of network on the people's web was no longer technology or wire sockets but us, huddled in anonymous groups and busily ferrying messages to and fro between ourselves.
Where this constant cycle of messaging and feedback has left us, I argue, is a place called Cyburbia. It explains the almost gravitational pull which grips people and pulls them back again and again into Cyburbia - and why they begin to feel twitchy when they haven't logged in. Thus far, the debate about the impact of our arsenal of new communication technologies has thus far been monopolised by internet gurus. The most lasting legacy of our new electronic machines, however, will surely depend on how they change us as human beings, and for this we need to know something about culture. Look hard enough and we can see new ways of organising culture which takes advantage of the fractured sensibility of the audience and its thirst for a more active involvement in the theatre that it sees. From the immersive work of theatre group punchdrunk, to the jarring, zigzagging, panoramic new stories on offer in TV series like The Wire and films like 21 Grams and Memento, there is good evidence that many all of this is having its effect on the culture we consume.
Cybernetics has brought us a long way, but now that its global information loop is fully built, it is in danger of leaving us lost and directionless. Now we need to spend some time thinking about the message - what it does to us to have the new communication technologies around, and how artists, culture-makers and everyone else might harness that new sensibility and turn it to their own advantage. The humble book took off, remember, not because its early evangelists went around waving them in people's faces or attesting to their incredible power, but because talented authors took the trouble to master this new way of working and write great books.
In the same way, our brilliant new technology for communication is still young and we are only just getting the hang of it. What we need now are new storytellers capable of awakening our interest with stories which allow us greater freedom for manoeuvre, employers canny enough to give us tasks which absorb our divided attention, teachers clever enough to whet our appetite for making associations, guides bold enough to take us by the hand through the fog of electronic information and show us something new. Enough about the medium - let's figure out what new kinds of messages we want to hear.
James Harkin is Director of Talks at the ICA and lead programmer of the Feedback season. He is author of Cyburbia, published by Little, Brown on February 12: www.cyburbia.tv
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