Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not A Gadget released in 2010 does
a remarkable job connecting with our in-class ideas of Self and Community in
accordance to technology. Lanier expresses a “locked-in” idea in which humans
now have the openness and freedom to permanently explore the unstructured vast
array of knowledge laid out throughout the World Wide Web. He speaks of the
development of the designs of things like web 2.0, MIDI, and Facebook in which he relates back to the experience
of what it ultimately means to be a person. Lanier’s “You Are Not a Gadget” emphasizes why
the most important thing to ask about any technology is how it changes people.
Overall, through the self, technology has the ability to both restrict and augment circles of
empathy that create a sense of community in the world in which we live.
Picture: Jaron Lanier's book, You Are Not a Gadget
Circles
of empathy Lanier describes as imaginary circles drawn by each person, “circumscribing
the person at some distance and corresponding to those things in the world that
deserve empathy” (36). His use of the
tone of empathy is overall used in purpose to show that some relationships
between humans and person to person cannot be solely understood or completely represented by a digital
database alone. Rather, these circles of empathy involve a larger controversy in
determining who will make the cut to lie just inside the circle versus those
who furthermore remain left outside of that rounding community of
empathy. The overall contents the person holds within the circle represent the self as a whole
and determine who one is by what they hold most important to themselves
indefinitely. Ultimately, Lanier
expresses that once the contents of the circle are changed, it is then when the
perception of the self must too change as well. Lanier expresses, “ The center
of the circle shifts as its perimeter is changed. The liberal impulse is to
expand the circle, while conservatives tend to want to restrain or contract the
circle” (37).
Lanier's "locked-in" analogy regarding the self and the community is quite evident today in explaining what happens when circles tend to become restricted. Many of those around us, including myself have had a high level of lock-in with Facebook itself. Facebook, the mere epitome of a container of the self, has the utmost profound ability to suck a person into a world of procrastination and lock them into the nature of the like-minded social networking beast itself. Crowds and data are overall becoming greater than individual beings and the true actual philosophical meaning of knowledge solely because of digital databases. While these digital databases may be doing a great job of forming lifestyle enclaves of like-minded people able to reconnect forming larger communal crowds all over the world, the individual and the self are ultimately being forgotten as too much time is being wasted behind a screen versus maintaining contact with one another via phone calls, face to face interaction, and ways of communication before the time of the World Wide Web that once promoted the well-being of our world. Lanier is ultimately underestimating the ability of a person to self correct and go back to old forms of communication once he or she becomes locked in to a specific data base. While technology and digital databases can truly help augment the self in terms of reconnecting with old friends in the past and aid in the efforts to connect with new people, Lanier emphasizes one must not become restricted within these circles, getting stuck in a digital platform in which they forget the original items that they once used in life to get by in the world.
To learn more about Jaron Lanier and his new book to be released on March 7th, 2013 visit his homepage below: http://www.jaronlanier.com
Lanier's "locked-in" analogy regarding the self and the community is quite evident today in explaining what happens when circles tend to become restricted. Many of those around us, including myself have had a high level of lock-in with Facebook itself. Facebook, the mere epitome of a container of the self, has the utmost profound ability to suck a person into a world of procrastination and lock them into the nature of the like-minded social networking beast itself. Crowds and data are overall becoming greater than individual beings and the true actual philosophical meaning of knowledge solely because of digital databases. While these digital databases may be doing a great job of forming lifestyle enclaves of like-minded people able to reconnect forming larger communal crowds all over the world, the individual and the self are ultimately being forgotten as too much time is being wasted behind a screen versus maintaining contact with one another via phone calls, face to face interaction, and ways of communication before the time of the World Wide Web that once promoted the well-being of our world. Lanier is ultimately underestimating the ability of a person to self correct and go back to old forms of communication once he or she becomes locked in to a specific data base. While technology and digital databases can truly help augment the self in terms of reconnecting with old friends in the past and aid in the efforts to connect with new people, Lanier emphasizes one must not become restricted within these circles, getting stuck in a digital platform in which they forget the original items that they once used in life to get by in the world.
Jaron Lanier author of: You Are Not a Gadget
To learn more about Jaron Lanier and his new book to be released on March 7th, 2013 visit his homepage below: http://www.jaronlanier.com
I appreciate this post on Lanier, and I like how you zero in on the concept of lock-in, which we explored in class. Also the circles of empathy were indeed an interesting concept in Lanier.
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