Jaron Lanier's 'You Are Not A Gadget'

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In the 21st century information is easily accessible. As teenagers evolve in the Web 2.0 world they can learn, comment on, and even steal information that is given freely on the Internet. The evolution of the Internet from inactive web pages to the growth of user-generated pages and the birth of social media is exactly what Jon Lanier has stated being disruptive to public discourse. Public discourse is all around us as we go on with our daily lives, and even more so when it comes to the Internet. In Jaron Lanier’s “You are not a Gadget” he has confronted the problem of there being so much sharing of information on the Internet that it has clouded who the creator was. After further analyses I believe that the use, practice, and redesign of…show more content…
Constant blogging, music downloading, Facebook updates and Twitter feeds have consumed our generation. This new technology has a huge impact on how we think and act. The way we as people communicate these days, by itself, is a disruption to public discourse. We text, email, tweet, post comments, etc. and with this, do we even communicate in person as much as we use to. Lanier compares communication to a “superhuman phenomenon”. The Internet has caused us to culturally change. The creation of Google has given us access to all the information we could think of, but who does that belong to? There was a time where paying for a CD or album was normal. Now with our Internet we can access almost everything we use for information and entertainment for free. Lanier has a strong perspective on how information does not deserve to be free. “ What if information is inanimate? What if it’s even less than inanimate, a mere artifact of human thought? What if only humans are real, and information is not?” (Pg. 28, Lanier). Lanier here is saying that information wants to be free and he tries to prove that in the old Internet it should be. But with the way the Internet has been growing he is concerned about us becoming a cultural stagnation, with all our sharing of information, music, and social media over and over again. There is a lot of profit when it comes to the Internet. We cannot grow as an economy if the Internet causes destruction in people’s property that deserves to be paid for. Lanier then states, “ The fundamental kind of information, which exists independently of the culture of an observer, is not the same as the kind we put into computers, the kind that supposedly wants to be free”(Pg. 28, Lanier). People have intellectual thoughts that belong to them. The Internet takes this away from people and it is almost impossible to control it. The creators of this information need to be

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