Kent Pitman and I both read You Are Not A Gadget by Jaron Lanier, and while Kent focuses on the technology discussed in Lanier's provocative, must-read, I've been fascinated by Lanier's discussion of what impact the Internet has had upon public discourse, creativity, the earning power of artists, and the swallowing up of the individual by the open culture of web 2.0.

Lanier fires his opening shot within the first couple of pages when he writes:

Anonymous blog comments, vapid video pranks, and lightweight mashups may seem trivial and harmless, but as a whole, this widespread practice of fragmentary, impersonal communication has demeaned interpersonal interaction. 

Communication is now often experienced as a superhuman phenonemenon that towers above individuals. A new generation has come of age with a reduced expectation of what a person can be, and of who each person might become.

Lest anyone think that Lanier is a Luddite, his bona fides to comment on web culture is that, according to the book jacket, he is considered the "father of virtual reality technology," and he has continued to do work in the internet field.

Lanier has written a book that covers both the wonders and the disasters of the web. Rather than provide a chapter-by-chapter breakdown of his arguments, which would, ironically perhaps keep you from buying the book (and I would, in effect, be giving away  Lanier's's ideas for free when it is the turning of creatives into peasants that Lanier rails against), I want to focus on a couple of points, and then urge you to buy yourself a copy of the book. 

As I just said, one of the problems of our current web culture is its free content. Consumers of this content often don't think of the creators; in many cases, open culture has encouraged anonymity, so people are providing content--be it music, prose, poetry, artwork--for free. In certain revolutions, the intelligentsia has been targeted while the peasant has been elevated. Lanier argues that the creatives have become the peasants, working for nought while the internet consumes, gannet-like, this constant creative production that the producers quickly lose control of. 

Two decades of web culture has shown that it is beyond rare that anyone gets rich off their cultural production on the web. (Of course, there are a few exceptions.) But, for the most part, those of us who toil away, "begs the question of how a person who is volunteering for the hive all day long will earn rent money."

Here at OS, this is one of those meta questions we never seem to get tired of asking. Either we're trying to figure out why certain people are getting the attention of the editors and sometimes even being promoted to "Big Salon," or we have long-running discussions about why we continue to do this: why do we continue to provide free content to this site when we will never be paid for it?

For me, the book raised important, and uncomfortable, questions. I have writer friends who have told me that writing on a blog means that the value of writing goes down--if people can read content for free--and I would argue that we have some fantastic writers on OS, why would anyone ever pay to read again? They have argued with me that I am contributing to my own irrelevance, that I will never make money writing because I've already established that I'm willing to give away my writing. But, I argue back, much of the stuff I write about is part of my activist work on behalf of issues--like the DRC, like feminist issues--that do not get covered in the mainstream press. So how else to get the word out?

And I am a published writer. While I have not yet published a book, I have written freelance paid articles for years. But my artistic work, some of which has been published, is frequently published in small journals that don't pay me either. So, is the web the only culprit in asking writers to write for the glory and forego the money?

Lanier argues forcefully that both the newspaper industry and the music industry were essentially screwed over by the web. Mistakes were made early in the handling of content. If each of us had been asked, from the very beginning, to pay a small fee to read each article--even a penny--we would have done so, and the creator would have gotten paid. Now, in an age where things are freely borrowed, unattributed, and when newspapers suddenly make decisions to start charging for content, they are derided. 

Lanier offers some workable solutions to these problems, but because I do not want to appropriate his ideas for free, I would urge you to buy the book. 

One last thing to say about the book. Many of us have also noted that people behave differently on the web. We hide behind our avatars, and we say things to one another that we would never say to one another's faces. Not only are we losing our sense of common civility, we are also losing our basic ability to communicate in rational manners. 

Mob rule governs places like Wikipedia, where knowledge becomes a matter of popularity and who controls the editing, not "facts". Mashups have become common forms of "originality," even if there's not a single original word in what is being offered. (I'm reminded of the recent story about the German teenager who put together a best-selling book of plagiarized bits and claimed it as original work.  Lanier was prescient that this type of book production was on the horizon.

The approach to digital culture I abhor would indeed turn all the world's books into one book...it might happen in the next decade or so. Google and other companies are scanning library books into the cloud in a a massive Manhattan Project  of cultural digitization. What happens next is what's important. If the books in the cloud are accessed via user interfaces that encourage mashups of fragments that obscure the content and authorship of each fragment there will be only one book. That is what happens today with a lot of content; often you don't know where a quoted fragment from a news story came from, who wrote a comment, or who shot a video. a continuation of the present trend will make us look like medieval religious empires or like North Korea, a society with a single book.....Authorship--the very idea of the individual point of view--is not a priority of the new ideology...Any singular, exclusive book, even the collective one accumulating in the cloud, will become a cruel book if it is the only one available. 

 I urge you to turn to Kent's take on this book. His post is at am i evolving into a gadget