You are not a gadget: a manifesto
2010; Association of College and Research Libraries; Volume: 47; Issue: 10 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5860/choice.47-5602
ISSN1943-5975
Autores Tópico(s)Digital Games and Media
ResumoAmazon Best Books of Month, January 2010: For most part, Web 2.0--Internet technologies that encourage interactivity, customization, and participation--is hailed as an emerging Golden Age of sharing and collaborative achievement, strength of democratized wisdom. Jaron Lanier isn't buying it. In You Are Not a Gadget, longtime tech guru/visionary/dreadlocked genius (and progenitor of virtual reality) argues opposite: that unfettered--and anonymous--ability to comment results in cynical mob behavior, shouting-down of reasoned argument, and devaluation of individual accomplishment. Lanier traces roots of today's Web 2.0 philosophies and architectures (e.g. he posits that Web anonymity is result of '60s paranoia), persuasively documents their shortcomings, and provides alternate paths to locked-in paradigms. Though its strongly-stated opinions run against bias of popular assumptions, You Are Not a Gadget is a manifesto, not a screed; Lanier seeks a useful, respectful dialogue about how we can shape technology to fit culture's needs, rather than way technology currently shapes us. A QA a useful fantasy, a nothing. It is nonexistent until and unless a person experiences it in a useful way. What we have done in last decade is give more rights than are given to people. If you express yourself on internet, what you say will be copied, mashed up, anonymized, analyzed, and turned into bricks in someone elses fortress to support an advertising scheme. However, information, abstraction, that represents you is protected within that fortress and is absolutely sacrosanct, new holy of holies. You never see it and are not allowed to touch it. This is exactly wrong set of values. The idea that is alive in its own right is a metaphysical claim made by people who hope to become immortal by being uploaded into a computer someday. It is part of what should be understood as a new religion. That might sound like an extreme claim, but go visit any computer science lab and youll find books about the Singularity, which is supposed future event when blessed uploading is to take place. A weird cult in world of technology has done damage to culture at large. Question: In You Are Not a Gadget, you argue that idea that collective is smarter than individual is wrong. Why is this? Jaron Lanier: There are some cases where a group of people can do a better job of solving certain kinds of problems than individuals. One example is setting a price in a marketplace. Another example is an election process to choose a politician. All such examples involve what can be called optimization, where concerns of many individuals are reconciled. There are other cases that involve creativity and imagination. A crowd process generally fails in these cases. The phrase Design by Committee is treated as derogatory for good reason. That is why a collective of programmers can copy UNIX but cannot invent iPhone. In book, I go into considerably more detail about differences between two types of problem solving. Creativity requires periodic, temporary as opposed to kind of constant global openness suggested by slogan information wants to be free. Biological cells have walls, academics employ temporary secrecy before they publish, and real authors with real voices might want to polish a text before releasing it. In all these cases, encapsulation is what allows for possibility of testing and feedback that enables a quest for excellence. To be constantly diffused in a global mush is to embrace mundanity. (Photo Jonathan Sprague)
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