The idea that culture has changed in order to fit technology into it is an interesting point. As a society, we automatically adapt to what is in front of us, so it would make sense if we are adapting to the environment technology is creating for us (in one example, MIDI).
I can't say that Lanier's fear of people losing their humanness and becoming part of the gadget world is necessarily really all that valid. The fact that "trains, files, and musical notes" have all been changed through the world of technology does not give any clues to the fact that human beings, in turn, are changing as well. We are all still the same exact form of a human being as we were 200 years ago. These web 2.0 people, or the wonderful group of artificial intelligence workers do not have any greater grasp on what makes up a human being than anybody else... I mean, hasn't everybody seen Surrogates by now? That didn't end well. The human brain is what makes a person. The ability to judge instinct, reason, express emotions in unconventional ways, etc. is what makes us human. If human beings have really changed that much since the good old cave days, why do we still create paintings? I mean, I understand that some people do enjoy working digitally for their artwork, but there is something about paint on a canvas that still excites me beyond belief. You can't feel digital artwork, I can feel paintings, literally. I enjoy touching oil paintings. Why? Because I can feel the work involved, I can feel what the artist was creating, the ridges in the paint, the brush strokes, everything that one human being created to be viewed by another.
"Emphasizing the crowd means deemphasizing individual humans in the design of society, and when you ask people not to be people, they revert to bad moblike behaviors. This leads not only to empowered trolls, but to a generally unfriendly and unconstructive online world."
A scientific view of the world isn't bad - but it isn't all that needs to be accounted for. I agree with Lanier completely that we are technically losing the individual human through the use of technology; hoewever, some of us are still holding on to that feeling. Social media has corrupted our way of communicating with each other and has seperated us from actual reality. Actually living is being out in the world, interacting with people, living beings, communicating face to face... Once again, the movie Surrogates gives us a great idea of what life would be like if Lanier's fears actually came true. We would literally just be drones, locked in our houses, walking around as artificial beings doing whatever we wanted without any consequences... and we don't have Bruce Willis to save the day.
I enjoyed this take on Lanier. It seems you agree with him in the danger inherent in some technology to cut us off from the world..
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