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Aug 15, 2010Leonardo7 rated this title 4 out of 5 stars
The following quote comes from the preface: It's early in the twenty-first century, and that means that these words will mostly be read by nonpersons-automatons or numb mobs composed of people who are no longer acting as individuals. The words will be minced into atomized search-engine keywords within industrial cloud computing facilities located in remote, often secret locations around the world. They will be copied millions of times by algorithms designed to send an advertisement to some person somewhere who happens to resonate with some fragment of what I say. They will be scanned, rehashed, and misrepresented by crowds of quick and sloppy readers into wikis and automatically aggregated wireless text message streams. Reactions will repeatedly degenerate into mindless chains of anonymous insults and inarticulate controversies. Algorithms will find correlations between those who read my words and their purchases, their romantic adventures, their debts, and, soon, their genes. Ultimately these words will contribute to the fortunes of those few who have been able to position themselves as lords of the computing clouds. The vast fanning out of the fates of these words will take place almost entirely in the lifeless world of pure information. Real human eyes will read these words in only a tiny minority of the cases. And yet it is you, the person, the rarity among my readers, I hope to reach. The words in this book are written for people, not computers. I want to say: You have to be somebody before you can share yourself. Lanier is very concerned about the inherent anonymity of participating in "Web 2.0". He makes a strong case for how it detracts from our sense of humanity and individuality. In his view: Emphasizing the crowd means deemphasizing individual humans in the design of society, and when you ask people not to be people, they revert to bad moblike behaviours. This leads not only to empowered trolls, but to a generally unfriendly and unconstructive online world. Finance was transformed by computing clouds. Success in finance became increasingly about manipulating the cloud at the expense of sound financial principles. Pop culture has entered into a nostalgic malaise. Online culture is dominated by trivial mashups of the culture that existed before the onset of mashups, and by fandom responding to the dwindling outposts of centralized mass media. It is a culture of reaction without action. Lanier then posts of a list of suggestions that each of us "can do to be a person instead of a source of fragments to be exploited by others." * Don't post anonymously unless you really might be in danger. * If you put effort into Wikipedia articles, put even more effort into using your personal voice and expression outside of the wiki to help attract people who don't yet realize that they are interested in the topics you contributed to. * Create a website that expresses something about who you are that won't fit into the template available to you on a social networking site. * Post a video once in a while that took you one hundred times more time to create than it takes to view. * Write a blog post that took weeks of reflection before you heard the inner voice that needed to come out. * If you are twittering, innovate in order to find a way to describe your internal state instead of trivial external events, to avoid the creeping danger of believeing that objectively described events define you, as they would define a machine. In the spirit of the Web ;) check out his website http://www.jaronlanier.com/