January 12, 2010, 3:42 pm
Death by Aggregation
by Henry Woodbury
Filed under: Books and Articles, Technology
In an interview for his book You Are Not a Gadget (scroll down) technologist Jason Lanier looks around and sees Internet dystopia:
Web 2.0 collectivism has killed the individual voice. It is increasingly disheartening to write about any topic in depth these days, because people will only read what the first link from a search engine directs them to, and that will typically be the collective expression of the Wikipedia. Or, if the issue is contentious, people will congregate into partisan online bubbles in which their views are reinforced….
Web 2.0 adherents might respond to these objections by claiming that I have confused individual expression with intellectual achievement. This is where we find our greatest point of disagreement. I am amazed by the power of the collective to enthrall people to the point of blindness. Collectivists adore a computer operating system called LINUX, for instance, but it is really only one example of a descendant of a 1970s technology called UNIX. If it weren’t produced by a collective, there would be nothing remarkable about it at all.
Meanwhile, the truly remarkable designs that couldn’t have existed 30 years ago, like the iPhone, all come out of “closed” shops where individuals create something and polish it before it is released to the public. Collectivists confuse ideology with achievement.
At The New York Times, John Tierney takes Lanier’s critique and runs with it — in a different direction. Where Lanier seeks to change the software technologies that undermine individual content creators, Tierney questions the net culture of intellectual property theft:
In theory, public officials could deter piracy by stiffening the penalties, but they’re aware of another crucial distinction between online piracy and house burglary: There are a lot more homeowners than burglars, but there are a lot more consumers of digital content than producers of it.
UPDATE: Glenn Harlan Reynolds of Instapundit reviews You Are Not a Gadget in today’s Wall Street Journal. While agreeing in part with Lanier’s critique of the failure of the aggregate model to reward creative individuals, he points out that social media applications are popular because they are fun – and not just for geeks:
Mr. Lanier is nostalgic for that era [the 1990s] and its homemade Web pages, the personalized outposts that have largely been replaced by the more standardized formats of Facebook and MySpace. The aesthetics of these newer options might be less than refined, but tens of millions of people are able to express themselves in ways that were unimaginable even a decade ago. And let’s face it: Those personal Web pages of the 1990s are hardly worth reviving. It’ll be fine with me if I never see another blinking banner towed across the screen by a clip-art biplane.
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