Planner Reads

I finished reading Jaron Lanier’s long awaited book – You are not a gadget – a few days ago and can’t stop thinking about it. He talks (more intelligently and from a much more informed position) about a number of different things that I’ve been interested in over the past few years. For a start, the foundational premise of the book is that we are shaping the Web in ways that are destructive to our humanity and individuality.

“We tinker with your philosophy by direct manipulation of your cognitive experience not indirectly through argument. It takes only a tiny group of engineers  to create technology that can shape the entire future of human experience with incredible speed. Therefore, crucial arguments about the human relationship with technology should take place between developers and users before such direct manipulations are designed. This book is about those arguments.”

I couldn’t agree more with this, many of the basic building blocks of the Web like Pagerank and popularity favour mainstream information that’s less likely to be really new or innovative. In addition the increasingly digital nature of our communication is eliminating a lot of the subtlety ...