Fascinating book ...

[blamebrampton]

I really like the sound of the book discussed in this article, has anyone read it?

 

vashtan , I think you in particular would like it. An excerpt:

Lanier, who is a scholar-in residence at the University of California and a partner architect with Microsoft, also noticed a disturbing tendency among the champions of the internet's "open culture" to humiliate and attack those who had lost out in the online revolution - the musicians, artists, journalists and others.

These and a dozen other observations led Lanier to conclude that something had gone terribly wrong: that we had reached a point where the network was being exalted as far more important than any individual. It is a thesis he explores in his book You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto.

 

Comments

[raitala.livejournal.com]

Strange coincidence! I've been watching this four-part BBC documentary on the internet by Dr Aleks Krotoski the last few weeks. It's been pretty good, charting its development and looking at the two sides of the coin. The hippy, utopian/libertarian ideals behind it being all free and unregulated and the upsides and downsides to how things have worked out in practice - political expression, commercial domination etc.

I can remember talking with my dad when we first got connected to the internet back in 1996 or something. I was asking what information was on there and he was trying to explain that it was all content put up by anyone who wanted to. I remember just not being able to comprehend at that point how content generated by just people could have any value whatsoever ;)

Things are certainly pretty choppy now. If people decided they don't want/aren't prepared to pay people who professionally dedicate their lives to writing, to music or to art we will all be the poorer. I love fanfic and fanart and certainly some professionally produced stuff is pretty mediocre, but the best novelists, artists, journalists are streets ahead of amateurs and I don't want to loose that.