{"id":502,"date":"2010-02-15T12:55:49","date_gmt":"2010-02-15T19:55:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jerrysjuicebar.com\/blog\/?p=502"},"modified":"2010-02-15T12:56:11","modified_gmt":"2010-02-15T19:56:11","slug":"a-social-media-lament-jaron-laniers-you-are-not-a-gadget","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jerrysjuicebar.com\/blog\/?p=502","title":{"rendered":"A social media lament … Jaron Lanier’s “You Are Not a Gadget”"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’d like to introduce you to an important book.\u00a0 It is Jaron Lanier’s “You Are Not a Gadget:\u00a0 A Manifesto.”<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

But first, a few questions.<\/p>\n

How are you?\u00a0 Everything good?<\/p>\n

How about your life on social media?\u00a0 How is that going?<\/p>\n

\"jaron_lanier\"Have you updated your blog? Gotten any comments lately?\u00a0 Any trackbacks?\u00a0 And your Facebook page?\u00a0 What is your friend count?\u00a0 Who’s writing on your wall?\u00a0 How about your Twitter feed?\u00a0 Have you checked in with your Google account?\u00a0 Gone through your Google alerts?\u00a0 Charted your progress with Google Analytics? \u00a0 Have you checked in with Foursquare?\u00a0 Did you get a new badge?\u00a0 How are your Twitter client numbers?\u00a0 Is your following getting bigger?\u00a0 Are your “retweets” growing?<\/p>\n

Is this you?\u00a0 Is this what social media is doing to your life?<\/p>\n

For those who are regular visitors to the JuiceBar you’ll know that I’ve a love\/hate relationship with social media.\u00a0 I think a lot of us do.\u00a0 And the irony of me taking on social media through social media is certainly not lost on me.<\/p>\n

Enter Jaron Lanier<\/strong><\/a>, the father of virtual reality.\u00a0 He is an admitted computer genius and geek but also a musician and artists.\u00a0 And as he looks around at what social media has done, he’s none too happy.\u00a0 His recent book “You Are Not a Gadget:\u00a0 A Manifesto” is a great read.\u00a0 Yesterday’s Washington Post review<\/strong><\/a> had a good summary paragraph up front.<\/p>\n

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.”<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If you think that’s good, try this.\u00a0 Here are a couple of excerpts from an interview on Amazon’s site<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n

Here Lanier talks about how Web 2.0 actually works against the average Joe …<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.\u00a0 Lanier writes:<\/p>\n

The original turn of phrase was “Information wants to be free.” And the problem with that is that it anthropomorphizes information. Information doesn\u2019t 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.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Think about that.<\/p>\n

With the whole huffing and puffing of social media claiming that “Content is King” … are we in turn making ourselves slaves?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’d like to introduce you to an important book.\u00a0 It is Jaron Lanier’s “You Are Not a Gadget:\u00a0 A Manifesto.” But first, a few questions. How are you?\u00a0 Everything good? How about your life on social media?\u00a0 How is that going? Have you updated your blog? Gotten any comments lately?\u00a0 Any trackbacks?\u00a0 And your Facebook…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[9],"tags":[10,13,6,48,154,5],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jerrysjuicebar.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/502"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jerrysjuicebar.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jerrysjuicebar.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jerrysjuicebar.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jerrysjuicebar.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=502"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/jerrysjuicebar.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/502\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":505,"href":"https:\/\/jerrysjuicebar.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/502\/revisions\/505"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jerrysjuicebar.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=502"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jerrysjuicebar.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=502"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jerrysjuicebar.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=502"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}