A Warning on the Web

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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