How have the structures of the internet, specifically web 2.0, influenced and affected the autonomy of its users?
“Something like missionary reductionism has happened to the internet with the rise of web 2.0. The strangeness is being leached away by the mush-making process. Individual web pages as they first appeared in the early 1990s had the flavor of personhood. MySpace preserved some of the flavor, though a process of regularized formatting had begun. Facebook went further, organizing people into multiple-choice identities, while Wikipedia seeks to erase point of view entirely.
If a church or government were doing these things, it would feel authoritarian but when technologies are the culprits, we seem hip, fresh, and inventive. People will accept ideas presented in technological form that would be abhorrent in any other form. It is utterly strange to hear my many old friends in the world of digital culture claim to be the true sons of the Renaissance without realizing that using computers to reduce individual expressions is a primitive, retrograde activity, no matter how sophisticated your tools are” (Lanier 48).
Lanier is making two significant moves in this quote: 1. He is highlighting the way web 2.0, specifically through programs like Facebook and Twitter, is fragmenting identities so that users can be more easily organized, controlled, and guided to create; and 2. He is making a comparison between the contemporary usages of web 2.0 and devices of authority we usually associate with more oppressive, i.e. non-democratic societies.
The “missionary reductionism” is one step in the colonization of the mind that Lanier fears is happening in the contemporary interactions between humans and computers. In the case of Facebook, Twitter, and many other social networking sites, users are given categories that influence their understandings of the self and their realities as these understandings are molded to fit into these rather specific categories. For example, according to my Facebook profile I am “married to Catherine Jay,” I “work at Regis University,” and I “study at the University of Denver.” These fragments of my identity are not how I understand myself, but they are the options I was given to describe who I am and they also allow me to mold my identity into a much more “ideal” me. Therefore, this may not be the “real” me, but this is the “Samuel Jay” that other Facebook users are able to consume.
It seems that Lanier is reticent to say this fragmentation is simply for economic purposes. It is the adage that Facebook is squeezing us into groups so that advertisers who will eventually use the site to market directly to our friends and us. This is yet to take off and Lanier does not see it happening on any earth-shattering scale. However, he does recognize that this move towards fragmentation is limiting creativity and forcing users to express themselves in a very specific way. Thus, while the splitting of identities into bytes of information might lead to a universal consciousness that we might be able to plug into, it is limiting the ways we are able to create and criticize. When the templates for art and the templates for analysis are handed to us, there are certain forms our creativity must take.
Lanier is also highlighting the hypocrisy inherent in viewing web 2.0 as a tool of liberation, especially in the ways it is being used at the moment. Web 2.0 and the programs making up its structure is taking up the same techniques of control that we tend to believe only exist in oppressive societies. People are fragmented into bits that come to define who they are, not necessarily to themselves or to those who have daily interactions with them, but to the system of control. Thus, I am not “Samuel Jay,” but rather a profile made up of likes and dislikes, hobbies and friends. This process of fragmentation not only allows people to be treated as objects (cogs in the system), but also allows people to be organized into controllable herds. Once this organization occurs we begin to think and create as a group rather than as autonomous entities, and our expressions are then much easier to mold.
Both of Lanier’s observations reaffirm the thesis of the first half of his book: that web 2.0 and the current state of the internet are beginning to fulfill the desires of cybernetic totalism and digital Maoism, thus leading towards a shared consciousness where creativity and criticism are structured by the system and autonomy is superficial. Lanier’s issue with the desire for shared consciousness is that it is driven by two beliefs: 1. Knowledge is finite and, 2. A complete truth can be known. These believers in technological utopia see us plugging in, combining what we know, and coming to a complete understanding of the world. This sounds great in theory, but what happens when you do not agree with the collective or when group-think trumps actual facts? Criticism becomes impossible and in a similar way, so does creativity.
Expressing one’s self becomes impossible in web 2.0 as it has drifted far from the collective dreams Lanier and his cohorts had for the internet during the 1980s and 1990s. If there is one thread that connects Lanier’s anecdotes and examples throughout the first half of the book it is that the collective is great in theory, but once the software (both figurative and literal) begins to lock us in, it becomes impossible to actually practice.
In trying to find a cultural artifact that might work against Lanier’s argument I am drawn to the “Arab Spring” and the role social media and Wikileaks played as catalysts in the uprising. In this situation it would appear that web 2.0 was being used in a collective and progressive ways, changing and advancing entire nations. Here hashtags, TweetPics, Wikileak information, and similar fragments were assembled by protesters and used for a mobilization that would eventually play significant roles in overthrowing the governments of Egypt and Libya.
In regards to this situation, I ask two questions:
1. If similar uses of fragmented information can be found in the “Occupy Movement” here in the United States, how might Lanier explain the lack of success it has had?
2. In his section “How to Use a Crowd Well” (56-59) Lanier argues that the collective can become an angry mob rather quickly allowing for change that comes too fast that puts the wrong people in power. What sort of affects could similar change have in these Arab Spring countries?
It was recently uncovered by a RealityTea.com, celebrity gossip blog using information from a collection of contributors, that a scene from E!’s Kim and Kourtney Take New York in which Kim Kardashian and her mother Kris are talking about Kim’s relationship with husband Kris Humphries was not shot in Dubai, where the daughter and mother were vacationing prior to the Kardashian-Humphries divorce, but was actually shot after the divorce in hopes of getting more sympathy for Kim when the season finale aired a few weeks ago.
The backlash has yet to coalesce, but in terms of Lanier’s work, the situation poses some interesting questions:
1. How does this situation reaffirm Lanier’s disdain for collective intelligence and networking? What might he say about a group coming together to crack popular culture mysteries rather than working towards more beneficial progress?
2. How could this event have repercussions for reality TV and if the backlash does happen, how might it change the media landscape in a way Lanier might actually support?
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