Lanier-->Is the Self what YOU want?

Many people, including Bellah, argue that America is becoming more individualized, relying on satisfying one's inner self. There have been strong arguments that technology seems to be helping in pushing people to become more individualized and self-reliant. New platforms, like Google or Amazon, help people to find information about what other people are thinking without actually having to have face to face conversations. But not everybody thinks that technology is helping people become more reliant on the self.

Jaron Lanier's book "You Are Not a Gadget" looks at how technology has influenced people to become not reliant on the self, but rather reliant on what technology says about certain things. For example, in a Ted talk (check it out at the 18:20 mark), Lanier suggests that new technology designs are most effective at self-confusion. We confuse what we really want to fit in with the technology design. He is concerned with the fact that people are letting algorithms recommend friends, movies, and music for us, rather than making decisions about social categories for ourselves.



So Lanier is suggesting that technology is influencing the self, making the community have a larger influence on personal decisions than the actual self. In "You Are Not a Gadget" Lanier makes several key points about what effect current technology can have on people, including this quote about the effects society can have on the decisions of the self.

"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 unconstructive online world." (pg. 19-20)


Technology superpowers like Google have as their goal to be able to tell what people want based on previous searches and what is popular among other people. This is what Lanier referred to as the crowd, and it deemphasized individual humans because people would would accept what Google offered them was what the majority of the community bought as well, so it must be a good product.