Many of you have probably never heard of Jaron Lanier. But this legendary computer scientist was included in Time’s 100 most influential people 2010 and is considered something of a technology futurist in that kind of hang loose, barefooted, dreadlock way.
Lanier was involved in the early development of virtual reality in the 1980’s – he created the phrase – and was an early member of the Silicon Valley set. As such his views have a lot of weight. Today he spends at least some of his time at Microsoft Research’s Stanford campus in a new virtual-reality lab.
He tends to be more widely known for his polemical views on web 2.0 most recently put forward in a book published last year You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto. People listen to him because he’s one of the original technologists and because ‘Gadget’ chimed with a lot of people.
For example, the introduction to Gadget unfurls with: “It’s early in the twenty-first century, and that means that these words will mostly be read by nonpersons… [words] minced into anatomized search engine keywords… copied millions of times by some algorithm somewhere designed to send an advertisement… scanned, rehashed, and misrepresented by crowds of quick and sloppy readers.”
At one level Gadget reads like a description of a dystopian society and his views in Wikipedia, Facebook and Twitter, are less than charitable. “Intellectual mob rule, dehumanizing” and “designed to encourage shallow interactions,” are some of his phrases. While many people don’t agree with these perceptions there are many who do.
It might be easy to dimiss Lanier as a ‘bah, humbug’ character or his views as a generational thing – he’s 51. In fact, many ‘Gadget’ reviewers subtly offered that conclusion. Lanier’s disappointment, however, lies in the fact that he believes technology can teach us more about our humanity, but only if we adopt the right approach.
Instead, he points out, we’re unwittingly adopting a machine-centric approach as commercial imperatives foist more and more technology on us – technology for technology’s sake. In an interview with the New Yorker and commenting about Facebook’s face-recognition software he says we’re creating a ‘paranoid’ society with a ‘fakey-fakey social life’ on the surface and a different private life.
His concern centres on the effect this will have on children as they grow up with technology and that there’s a danger technology could isolate us as individuals from each other.
He believes that rather than using technology to learn more about the human condition and potential we’re actually moving in the opposite direction – in a sense cutting at the roots of our humanity.
Despite his digital pioneering status Lanier has always been considered something of an outsider; a ‘weird outsider’ as he describes himself. But his views do chime and resonate with quite a number of people. And as many psychologists, artists and thinkers would probably tell you, outsiders do have the ability to be see things more objectively, precisely because they are outside.
What do you think – do you agree with Lanier and think ‘social’ technology is making us more superficial or do you think it’s actually enhancing our lives?
photo courtesy of Thomas Hawk