Jaron Lanier Rants Against the World of Web 2.0

hao3 writes "In his new book, You Are Not A Gadget, former Wired writer Jaron Lanier bemoans what the internet has become. 'It's early in the twenty-first century, and that means that these words will mostly be read by nonpersons,' it begins. The words will be 'minced into anatomized search engine keywords,' then 'copied millions of times by some algorithm somewhere designed to send an advertisement,' and then, in a final insult, 'scanned, rehashed, and misrepresented by crowds of quick and sloppy readers.' Lanier's conclusion: 'Real human eyes will read these words in only a tiny minority of the cases.' He goes on to criticise Google, Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, open-source software and what he calls the 'hive mind.'"

Comments

Can someone summarize this?

[Anonymous Coward]

I didn't read the article.

Re:Can someone summarize this?

[Sockatume]

Indeed, if web 2.0 leads to content being scanned, rehashed, and misrepresented by crowds of quick and sloppy readers then we're way ahead of the curve. Go Slashdot!

I do wonder how many of his concerns are actually unique to web 2.0, and not common to the social use of the web in general. Maybe I should read it.