I started reading Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not A Gadget: A Manifesto tonight and gobbled up the first chapter… Seriously, I inhaled it. It smacks of being written by an individual who knows what he’s talking about, and has something very important to tell us about the future of the web. Most welcome about Lanier’s book is that he sets out to challenge the most optimistic of technophiles regarding the inevitability of technology. That is, the world we live in was not written in advance, and it is not the result of abstract technological progress. Rather, it is the result of human beings and human decisions. (For example, whatever one thinks about a TV show like Dragon’s Den, at least it demonstrates that technologies do not just drip off the linear time line of progress, but depend on whether someone can be compelled to fund them.) On this theme, Lanier warns us that some “so-called web 2.0. ideas are stinkers, so we ought to reject them while we can”.
But what is it that makes an idea a “stinker”? Well, that has to do with what the idea does to us, and how it regards human beings. As Lanier puts it, bad ideas tend to “…reduce our expectation of what a person can be, and of who each person might become.” Bad ideas create an environment that reduces what a human being is. And technology, as is well known, has a tendency for reduction. For example, software design itself aims to apply absolute perfection to something actually quite messy. UNIX, for example, “expresses too large a belief in abstract symbols and not enough of a belief in temporal, continuous, non abstract reality; it is more like a typewriter than a dance partner”. Later on Lanier discusses the loss of the “unfathomable penumbra of meaning that distinguishes a word in natural language from a command in a computer program”.
But the real kicker, and something that ought to set off alarm bells with even the lightest technology user, is Lanier’s description of the audio format MIDI. He writes that MIDI “could not describe the curvy, transient expressions a singer or saxophone player can produce. It could only describe the tile mosaic world of the keyboardist, not the watercolor world of the violin. … .[T]he whole of human auditory experience has [with hegemony of MIDI] become filled with discrete notes that fit in a grid”. Lanier worries that this replacement of auditory experience with discrete notes on a grid could happen to the ‘human’ experience. “What happened to trains, files, and musical notes could” he ominously points out in one chapter heading “happen soon to the definition of a Human Being”.
This is because what we are, as human beings, has to do with the tools we interact with and express ourselves through. Consider the quote that begins the book: “Speech is the mirror of the soul; as a man speaks, so he is. – Publilius Syrus”. In the early days of the internet individual people created websites… Remember that? I had a Star Wars Action Figure website built out of basic HTML. The web was full of personal websites and, in Lanier’s words, “it had flavor”. Lanier worries that the ideology/design of the new social media experience has removed this personal flavor.
He cleverly suggests a couple ways we might avoid being reduced by social media. For example:
-Stop posting anonymously, as a node in the faceless crowd. Post with flavour and individuality.
-Work on personal expression by “creat[ing] a website that expresses something about who you are that wont 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 believing that objectively described events define you, as they would a machine”
It is nice being reminded, in an age that espouses the virtues of fragmentation and the power of the crowd, that personal expression and depth still matter. In a tone uncharacteristic of popular-technology books Lanier begs us to recognize that being a person is “not a pat formula, but quest, a mystery, a leap of faith”. As such, we ought to seek out “the edge of mystery, to ponder the things that can’t quite be defined – or rendered into a digital standard”. It is important that we decide now whether the type of communicative experience we want ‘locked in’ is the 2.0. one symbolized by Facebook, Twitter and Google. Offering a humanistic alternative to “antihuman way[s] of thinking” is one that I share with Lanier, and it has been a theme running through nearly all of the posts on Cybject.
I look forward to reading, and discussing, the remaining 13 chapters…
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