Having seen Julia get torn to pieces by an audience in
Berlin, I decided to give the book a go. But first Berlin. After an excruciating
anecdote about her being in the company of Royalty in St James Palace and meeting
Zak Goldsmith (it made no sense, other than name dropping), she laid out the
ideas in her book describing networks as including Facebook, Ebola and Zika –all basically the
same thing, a ridiculous conflation of ideas. “All this social media is turning us into
sheep” she bleated. Then asked “How many of you feel unhappy in your jobs?” Zero hands went up. Oh dear,
try again. “How many of
you feel overloaded?” Three hands in a packed room. Ooops that punctured the
proposition.... She then made a quick retreat into some ridiculous
generalisations about her being the first to really look at networks, that Trump
should be thrown off Twitter (strong anti-freedom of expression line here....
bit worrying). Basically playing the therapeutic contrarian. The audience were having none
of it, many of them experts in this field.
Then came
the blowback. Stephen
Downes, who knows more than most on the subject of networks, was blunt
“Everything you’ve said is just wrong” Wow. He then explained that there’s a
large literature on networks and that the subject has been studied in depth and
that she was low on knowledge and research. He was right. Andrew Keen on
Stephen Downes accusation that Hobsbawn was flakey on assumptions and research "Good
- glad to see someone with a hard hitting point..." Claire Fox then joined
the fray.... pointing out that this contrarian stuff smacks of hysteria – it’s
all a bit preachy and mumsy.
So, fast
forward, I’m back from Berlin and bought the book – Fully Connected. To be fair I wanted to read the work for myself. Turns
out the audience was right.
Fully Connected
The Preface opens up with a tale about Ebola, setting the
whole ‘networks are diseased and I have the cure’ tone of the book. “Culture,
diseases, ideas: they’re all about networks” says Hobsbawn. Wow – she’s serious
and really does want to conflate these things just to set up the self-help
advice. What follows is a series of well-worn stuff about Moore’s Law, Stanley
Milgram, Six Degrees of Separation, Taleb’s Black Swan, Tom Peters, Peter
Drucker… punctuated by anecdotes about her and her family. It’s a curious
mixture of dull, middle-class anecdotes and old school stuff without any real
analysis or insights.
Ah, but here comes her insight – her new term ‘social health’. All is revealed. Her
vision is pathalogocal, the usual deficit view of the modern world. All of you out
there are wrapped up in evil spiders’ webs, diseased, and I have the cure.
Her two big ideas are The Way to Wellbeing and The Blended Self. All of this is
wrapped up in the pseudo-medical nonsense; Information obesity, Time
starvation, Techno-spread, Organisational bloat. It’s like a bad diet book
where you’re fed a diet of bad metaphors. Her ‘Hexagon’ of social health is the
diagnosis and cure, as she puts herself forward as the next Abraham Maslow –
replacing the pyramid with a hexagon – we’re networked geddit?
Part two is even worse. The usual bromides around Disconnecting,
Techno-shabbats, Designing your honeycomb, The knowledge dashboard. Only then
do you realise that this is a really bad, self-help book based on a few
personal anecdotes and no research whatsoever.
The postscript says it all, a rambling piece about the Forth
Road Bridge. I grew up in the town beneath that bridge and saw it built – but
even I couldn’t see what she was on about. There are some serious writers in this
area, like Andrew Keen, Nicholas Carr and others, Julia is not one of them.
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