In this online radio interview, internet visionary Jaron Lanier talks about the danger of Web 2.0 turning us into a collectivist digital mush. He’s got a new book out, so doing a lot of PAs lately.
The problems, to paraphrase, are these:
Collectivisation We’ve reached for the wisdom of crowds, and this silences individual voices. This blog post becomes the expression of a meme, rather than me talking, and serves to fuel advertising machines. This is a particular problem if you make your living from music, photography, writing and other creative disciplines. There’s always the next result in your Google search.
Failure to forget It’s become impossible to re-invent yourself because the Net remembers everything about you. There can’t be a new Bob Dylan because the Web will remember Robert Zimmerman forever.
Religion We’ve fetishised the Web to the extent that we regard it as a living, omniscient entity. Advertising is regarded as the most important element of the Internet, to the detriment of the individuals who create the content. This is typical of the first steps towards creating a new religion, argues Lanier.
Youthiness A popular defence is that the social web is built to reflect the norms and expectations of young people. Lanier counters that he’s spoken to a lot of young people who feel the same as him. The people speaking for young people are likely to be middle-aged business people who work in advertising.
Bubbles The Internet gives us the opportunity to meet all sorts of different people, yet the design of many social sites makes the pack mentality easier and more efficient than ever. We stick to our own bubbles and never come across these different people.
I’ve written on most of these themes before and have considerable sympathy for his opinions, while still retaining enormous enthusiasm for a lot of what’s going on. Jaron’s views (and mine) might be regarded as the next stage of the hype cycle, whereby the impossibly high expectations created around new technologies are discovered to be unattainable. This leads to the ‘trough of disillusionment’ whereby the same technologies that were previously held in such high regard are regarded as worthless or detrimental. In time, the theory goes, we recover from this disillusionment and find out what’s actually useful in this innovation.
But that would be to collectivise his opinion – and I should probably avoid that.
In the latter part of the interview, Jaron gets to debate David Weinberger, who remains an evangelist for the social web, so it’s well worth listening to the whole thing.
Jaron is coming to London in a couple of weeks, and I’m very much looking forward to seeing him speak at the RSA.
picture credit: vanz
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January 18th, 2010 → 4:29 pm @ Ian Delaney
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