Jaron Lanier
Well, Tyler Cowan and I have been reading the same thing (in different places, though). Jaron Lanier's latest book, You Are Not a Gadget, recently came out and has sparked some controversy. It was excerpted in the most recent Harper's (where I found it). The thesis seems to be that the social media, and the internet 2.0 (or are we at 3.0, now?) in general rather than giving agency to people is forcing them to subsume what little agency they have to an internet hive mind. I disagree, of course, but it's interesting stuff. Representative quote:
If money is flowing to advertising instead of to musicians, journalists, and artists, than a society is more concerned with manipulation than with truth or beauty. If content is worthless, then people will start to become empty-headed and content-less. The combination of hive mind and advertising has resulted in a new kind of social contract. The basic idea of this contract is that authors, journalists, musicians, and artists are encouraged to treat the fruits of their intellects and imaginations as fragments to be given without payment to the hive mind. Reciprocity takes the for of self-promotion. Culture is to become precisely nothing but advertising.
I feel... pierced. I will now take the next seventeen seconds to reevaluate my life.
I'm back. Here's more.
I know quite a few people, most of them young adults, who are proud to say that they have accumulated thousands of friends on Facebook. Obviously, their statements can be true only if the idea of friendship is diminished.
...
Under the No Child Left Behind act of 2002, for example, U.S teachers are forced to choose between teaching general knowledge and "teaching to the test." The best teachers are thereby disenfranchised by the improper use of educational-informational systems.
What computerized analysis of all the country's school tests has done to education is exactly what Facebook has done to friendships. In both cases, life is turned into a database. Both degradations are based on the same philosophical mistake, which is the belief that computers can currently represent human thought or human relationships. ... When technologists deploy a computer model of something like learning or friendship in a way that has an effect on real lives, they are relying on faith. When they ask people to live their lives through their models, they are potentially reducing life itself.
Phew. It's interesting stuff, make no mistake. But it's an unflaggingly negative view of things that have plenty of positive upshots. That said, there's something to his critique of computer modeling, particularity when seen through a philosophy of science lens. That is: models are not truth apt; they can not be true or false, they can only be useful or not useful. A model of an atom is useful if we can use it to learn about how real atoms behave. A model of education is useful if we can use it to learn about how real people learn. A model of friendship is useful is useful if we can use it to learn how people behave in friendship. None of these things indicate that NCLB is a true account of education or that Facebook is a true account of friendship. Clearly, it's a mistake to think that they are; indeed, the entire idea that they could be is incoherent. Models are not truth apt. The mistake isn't in the existence of Facebook or NCLB (though the latter is debatable); the mistake is in taking what they tell as something that can be true or false. (Similarly, the mistake isn't in the existence of economics; the mistake is in taking what economics tells us as being true or false--it's useful or not useful.)
When seen through this light, though, the answer to the problem Lanier has brought up isn't that we should look negatively at Facebook; it's that we should look negatively at how people use or mis-use Facebook. Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
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