Fred Truman
Design & Code Creative
Lanier’s Point on Authorship
March 11, 2011
The assignment: Read chapters 1-3 from Jaron Lanier’s “You Are Not A Gadget” and persuasive essay in response to his ideas.
I first read Mr. Lanier’s book last semester after hearing him speak in my Applications class, and I was struck by a number of ideas that he tackles. I am more of a technological optimist than a pessimist, but I do appreciate the light he sheds onto the discussions surrounding technology, particularly the history and birth of computing. Reconsidering historical events in a “People’s History of the United States” tradition is something that I am always in favor of. Despite this appreciation, the analogies he draws to contextualize our current state in the advancement of technology are questionable however, particularly his opinions of authorship in a post web 2.0 world.
Given the efforts by corporations to digitize all the world’s books (and it follows that with these, all the world’s ideas) that we are in essence creating ONE book and given this trend we are in danger of turning our society into one “like various medieval religious empires, or like North Korea, a society with a single book.” This is a bit ridiculous. I understand his fear of a static world where nothing can be questioned and no one moves, which I imagine looks something like this:
Where there is an infinite mass of individuals, all with more or less the same ideas and few questioning the status quo in order to drive our collective thoughts in an upward motion. He would prefer that our world of ideas look something like:
This is a world of individual genius (I think I’ve actually included too many geniuses here) driving innovation and being rewarded financially for their work. This is definitely an improvement on the previous world. The only problem I have with this model is that there are vast troughs of ignorance where knowledge is unattainable and that create an unstable environment where the blue midgets threaten to topple the progress down to their level out of fear of the unknown.
I would say that the current state of progress looks visually similar to the first example, in that the collective balance is more stable but the difference (which is difficult to illustrate here with static graphics) is the velocity with with the bars are moving up thus creating a society not in stasis but in rapid equilibrium. New ideas, because access to collective knowledge is far greater, shoot ahead and above of the norm but are quickly absorbed back into the average not in a downward motion, but by the rapid adoption and upward motion of the rest of the pack:
Our one book, in contrast to the one book of medieval empires or that of North Korea is constantly being rewritten and constantly being reconsidered. It may seem like we have become lazy given the amount of remix content we find, but the remix of content at the very least implies exposure to content and new ideas. I would argue that before individuals can achieve their own genius, they should be allowed to play around with others for a bit and this is something that was not always possible in the world we have just left. One that Mr. Lanier seems to be quite nostalgic about, and nothing more.