I’d like to introduce you to an important book.  It is Jaron Lanier’s “You Are Not a Gadget:  A Manifesto.”

But first, a few questions.

How are you?  Everything good?

How about your life on social media?  How is that going?

Have you updated your blog? Gotten any comments lately?  Any trackbacks?  And your Facebook page?  What is your friend count?  Who’s writing on your wall?  How about your Twitter feed?  Have you checked in with your Google account?  Gone through your Google alerts?  Charted your progress with Google Analytics?   Have you checked in with Foursquare?  Did you get a new badge?  How are your Twitter client numbers?  Is your following getting bigger?  Are your “retweets” growing?

Is this you?  Is this what social media is doing to your life?

For those who are regular visitors to the JuiceBar you’ll know that I’ve a love/hate relationship with social media.  I think a lot of us do.  And the irony of me taking on social media through social media is certainly not lost on me.

Enter Jaron Lanier, the father of virtual reality.  He is an admitted computer genius and geek but also a musician and artists.  And as he looks around at what social media has done, he’s none too happy.  His recent book “You Are Not a Gadget:  A Manifesto” is a great read.  Yesterday’s Washington Post review had a good summary paragraph up front.

A self-confessed “humanistic softie,” Lanier is fighting to wrest control of technology from the “ascendant tribe” of technologists who believe that wisdom emerges from vast crowds, rather than from distinct, individual human beings. According to Lanier, the Internet designs made by that “winning subculture” degrade the very definition of humanness. The saddest example comes from young people who brag of their thousands of friends on Facebook. To them, Lanier replies that this “can only be true if the idea of friendship is reduced.”

If you think that’s good, try this.  Here are a couple of excerpts from an interview on Amazon’s site.

Here Lanier talks about how Web 2.0 actually works against the average Joe …

The problem is not inherent in the Internet or the Web. Deterioration only began around the turn of the century with the rise of so-called “Web 2.0″ designs. These designs valued the information content of the web over individuals. It became fashionable to aggregate the expressions of people into dehumanized data. There are so many things wrong with this that it takes a whole book to summarize them. Here’s just one problem: It screws the middle class. Only the aggregator (like Google, for instance) gets rich, while the actual producers of content get poor.

And the big problem according to Lanier is this crazy idea of the “liberation” of information — as if what we’re doing on the social media front is akin to the storming of the Bastille.  Lanier writes:

The original turn of phrase was “Information wants to be free.” And the problem with that is that it anthropomorphizes information. Information doesn’t deserve to be free. It is an abstract tool; a useful fantasy, a nothing. It is nonexistent until and unless a person experiences it in a useful way. What we have done in the last decade is give information more rights than are given to people.

Think about that.

With the whole huffing and puffing of social media claiming that “Content is King” … are we in turn making ourselves slaves?

Concept one:  Permanent record.

When you read that what do you think of?

Well, since I don’t hear you saying anything I’ll tell you what I think of.

Prison time.  Felony conviction.  Registered sex offender.  Tatoos.

Anything — like a shadow on a sunny day — that follows you around no matter where you go and no matter how you shake it.

Now for concept two:  privacy.

You may find this a bit odd, but I’m actually a pretty private person.  I’m not a privacy freak.  I’m not overly worried about identity theft.  I’m not concerned about personally identifiable information floating around.   I sign all those release forms when I go to the doctor.

No.  It is just that I’m just very content being by myself.  Never been a crowd or party guy.  And in my corporate profile I note my motto as being “discretion is the price of freedom.”  Translated that means that when talking about yourself, less is more.

Then I realize that I have a blog, I have a twitter feed, I have a Facebook page, a Plaxo page, a LinkedIn page.

And I realize that I’m not a private person at all!

Now comes Gordon Belt’s book Total Recall.  In his review of the book in the Wall Street Journal, Felt writes :

In a new book, principal Microsoft researcher Gordon Bell evangelizes for “Total Recall,” a practice that he describes with this motto: “Capture everything, discard nothing.” The idea is to use newly available technologies to record every moment of our lives, public and private. Each of us will build a vast digital database of our every experience. Mr. Bell claims that soon “you will be able to summon up everything you have ever seen, heard, or done.”

Whoa.  He goes on to write that with all this new technology and social media stuff, we’ll never have to remember anything.  We won’t have to use our brain or our memories.  We’ll just do a Google search.

It may be because I’m prone to lapses of memory but truth be told, sometime I like to forget.  It is comforting.  I don’t know if I want to be able to summon up everything I’ve ever seen, heard, or done.

I certainly don’t want others to.

OK, now I’m a bit nervous.

“Communications is technology.”

Or something like that.

That’s what my daughter said excitedly as she told me about her new english major courses at George Mason University.  The excitement in her voice and the enthusiasm in her eyes made her impromptu presentation contagious.

She took me to the creation of Jonathan Harris and Sep Kanvar.

It is a site called We Feel Fine.

Check it out.  I don’t know if it is the future of communications and literature.  But it is certainly fascinating.  It is literature, research, ethnography, technology, emotions, and crowd-sourced literature all rolled into one.

According to the site:

Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the “feeling” expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.

The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 – 20,000 new feelings per day. Using a series of playful interfaces, the feelings can be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices, offering responses to specific questions like: do Europeans feel sad more often than Americans? Do women feel fat more often than men? Does rainy weather affect how we feel? What are the most representative feelings of female New Yorkers in their 20s? What do people feel right now in Baghdad? What were people feeling on Valentine’s Day? Which are the happiest cities in the world? The saddest? And so on.

And so with that, I’ll say this, hoping that at some point some of these nuggets are harvested by the We Feel Fine site and that my contribution adds to someone’s day and another person’s science.

I feel good.  At least today I feel that way.  There have been many days in the past when I’ve felt bad.  Perhaps even miserable.  But today’s a good one.  So far.  You never know.  I could be feeling crummy this afternoon.  Something crazy could happen.  I could remember something stupid and start feeling blue.  Feelings are that way.  Very capricious things those feelings are.  But right now, I feel good.  And the fact that I’m feeling good, feels good.

Have a nice day.