You Are Not A Gadget

Jaron Lanier gives readers his steps to becoming more human within his first chapter.  Jaron argues that the world is coming more robotic, not just in the since of computers are more popular than others, but also we, as humans are changing right along with the timeline of computers.  Jaron mentions that we will have become dull and that the fad of anonymity has been wrongly empowered.  When the web first came into existence, Jaron writes about how flavor the web had because people created their own blogs and websites that were unique and companies were not a part of the picture yet, ruining the web with advertisements.  Jaron, wants to see the world wide web go back to hat and he creates a list that proposes to help change user's minds about how they operate and participate in the web.

• Don't post anonymously unless you really might be in danger.
• If you put effort into Wikipedia articles, put even more effort into using your personal voice and expression outside of the wiki to help attract people who don't yet realize that they are interested in the topics you contribute to.
• Create a website that expresses something about who you are that won't fit into the template available to you on a social networking site 

•  Post a video once in a while that took you one hundred more time to create than it takes to view

•  Write a blog post that took weeks of reflection before you heard the inner voice that needed to come out
• If you are twittering, innovate in order to find a way to describe your internal state instead of trivial external events, to avoid the creeping danger of believing that objectively described events define you, as they would define a machine.

-Lanier, p.20 

The advice that Lanier gives pertains to how he thinks that people should follow in order for the nation to have a better understanding of the current mistakes that the web harbors.  Lanier makes it clear that he does not like present social statures that the internet gives.  His first problem has to do with the fact that people post anonymously.  Posting without using your name gives the commenter a place to run or hide, or have no accountability for their actions.  If people stopped posting anonymously the community could lessen some of the cyber bullying,  because half of cyber bullies are from those that the victim does not know.  In this way, if everyone changed their own actions, then they could change a whole community.

Lanier wants the users of the internet to write blog posts after weeks of reflection and not when your emotions are at their peak.  This advice reminds me of the film, The Social Network.  In the beginning of the movie, Mark Zuckerburg blogged about his break up with his girlfriend while intoxicated.  It was a terrible decision and made life for his girlfriend terrible.  If everyone took their time blogging, instead of making rash decisions, life on the internet would be less unpredictable.

When many people change their actions to be a little more positive, then a whole community will be impacted  positively.  Lanier could just be over exaggerating with his need for the internet of the past to come back to what it used to be, or he could be making good points by saying that the internet has been degrading recently and the problem needs to be fixed.  He realizes the problem and then finds a way to fix it.