In You Are Not A Gadget, Jaron Lanier states:
When developers of digital technologies design a program that requires you to interact with a computer as if it were a person, they ask you to accept in some corner of your brain that you might also be conceived of as a program. When they design an internet service that is edited by a vast anonymous crowd, they are suggesting that a random crowd of humans is an organism with a legitimate point of view.
Lanier also states earlier in the same essay, “Technologies are extensions of ourselves…”. If the majority of the population is unimaginative, so too will be our technologies. People are content with Facebook and its mundane design and interface. Nobody questions the blandness of Google’s homepage. Yes, the most popular videos on YouTube are slapstick. It seems that what Lanier is bemoaning is the banality of humanity.
We shouldn’t seek to make the pack mentality as efficient as possible. We should instead seek to inspire the phenomenon of individual intelligence.
What Lanier fails to take account of with these statements is the phenomena of emergence. It is from complex systems that innovators and overmen arise. The humdrum Lanier criticizes is necessary to provide a base for the next level of ideas to appear. The early adopters of the internet were a quirky set, but they built their particular worlds on a pre-existing, workaday framework of code and telecommunications.
Perhaps we’ve hit a plateau. All of the Western world is on-line now. We’ve built the same mess we built on the ground. It may be a matter of patience, waiting for one, or a combination of two things to take place: 1) for the global South and East to join us on the WWW (although China seems hell-bent on being more American than Americans); 2) for the technologies of today to become ubiquitous enough to provide the infrastructure necessary for the next synthesis of innovation to emerge.
One thing to keep in mind is the rate of change in digital technology. Today it’s Facebook, but only a short time ago it was mySpace and before that Friendster. Friends today, gone tomorrow.
The deeper concern that Lanier is not addressing is the nature of beast. Maybe it’s a hard truth to accept that the human animal is, as a whole, boring. The question is: how do we design our technologies knowing the human tendency towards triteness? How do we design a future that keeps a space open for creative innovation?
The phenomenon of individual intelligence is already inspired. We simply need to ensure that it has access to new frontiers. The hive will follow.
The iPad is a worm in the Apple. The crowd is underwhelmed. This glossy tschochke is evidence of the beginning of the end of an era. 