{"id":197,"date":"2011-08-16T14:22:28","date_gmt":"2011-08-16T19:52:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stephaniegolden.net\/writing_blog\/?p=197"},"modified":"2014-01-05T12:20:54","modified_gmt":"2014-01-05T17:50:54","slug":"social-media-inspiration-google-or-minus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/stephaniegolden.net\/writing_blog\/social-media-inspiration-google-or-minus\/","title":{"rendered":"Social media &#038; inspiration: Google+ or minus?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In a race to beat the other Stephanie Goldens out there, I got myself an invite to Google+, and secured possession of\u2014my name.\u00a0 A real coup, right? I haven\u2019t learned yet how to use Google+, but once I do, it&#8217;ll be a big boost to my career&#8230; right?<\/p>\n<p>Not according to computer scientist Jaron Lanier, who says social media just reduce everyone to little more than the database fields they fill in to create their profile. In his manifesto <a title=\"go to Amazon page for this book\" href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/dp\/0307389979\/?tag=stephaniegold-20\" target=\"_blank\"><em>You Are Not a Gadget,<\/em><\/a> he attacks two notions popular among his community of techies:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>the \u201cwisdom of the crowd,\u201d which Lanier calls the \u201chive mind\u201d;<\/li>\n<li>the seductiveness of the idea that \u201cbits can be alive on their own\u201d\u2014that is, machines can attain consciousness.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<div id=\"attachment_199\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\" style=\"width: 160px\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.fotopedia.com\/wiki\/Honey_bee\/items\/flickerslair-o9s-NhBoTlA\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-thumbnail wp-image-199  \" style=\"margin-top: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;\" title=\"Click for photo credit\" alt=\"http:\/\/images.cdn.fotopedia.com\/flickerslair-o9s-NhBoTlA-hd.jpg\" src=\"http:\/\/stephaniegolden.net\/writing_blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/08\/behive-150x150.jpg\" width=\"150\" height=\"150\" \/><\/a><p class=\"wp-caption-text\">The &#8220;hive mind&#8221;: Heidi Welch, &#8220;Bees on Honeycomb&#8221;<\/p><\/div>\n<p>Together, he says, these ideas degrade the concept of personhood, which loses its individuality and (more important, to my mind) the mystery of its being and its spiritual quality. In his book <em>Of a Fire on the Moon,<\/em> about the NASA space program, Norman Mailer developed a rather mystical notion that machines contained a soul. For him this was a metaphor for what he saw as the heroic man\/machine enterprise that climaxed in the moon landing. The contemporary idea that machines can be conscious is just flat\u2014the opposite of heroic, the antithesis of human.<\/p>\n<p>Devaluing individuality wipes out true creativity, which requires the singular vision that arises only from ineffable, individual personhood. That, says Lanier, is why online culture so often just rehashes cultural material from the pre-internet era (really original stuff being in short supply.)<\/p>\n<p>Wikipedia is Lanier\u2019s main example of the way \u201ccrowd-sourcing\u201d eliminates the individual voice. It\u2019s always at the top of search results, so people click the Wikipedia link, missing more original, ambitious material.<\/p>\n<p>The flattening of individuals into a \u201chive\u201d also undermines the concept of authorship. To me\u2014an author\u2014this is the true horror. There\u2019s a notion that all books should become \u201cone book\u201d once they\u2019re digitized and put online. Then anyone can take any fragment out of context and \u201cmash\u201d it with any other fragment. Lanier makes the very good point that online mashups destroy the original context in which a work is made, which then destroys their meaning.<\/p>\n<p>In terms of my Venn diagram, the <em>inspiration<\/em> circle simply falls out of the picture. A whole piece of <em>my<\/em> personhood is gone. Once I figure out how to use Google+, will I just be buzzing around the global hive, as my mind melds into a single worker-bee brain?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In a race to beat the other Stephanie Goldens out there, I got myself an invite to Google+, and secured possession of\u2014my name.\u00a0 A real coup, right? I haven\u2019t learned yet how to use Google+, but once I do, it&#8217;ll be a big boost to my career&#8230; right? Not according to computer scientist Jaron Lanier, who says social media just reduce everyone to little more than the database fields they fill in to create their profile. In his manifesto You Are Not a Gadget, he attacks two notions popular among his community of techies: the \u201cwisdom of the crowd,\u201d which[&#8230;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34,22,4],"tags":[33,127,32,31,126,30],"class_list":["post-197","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-creativity","category-inspiration","category-writing","tag-consciousness","tag-creativity","tag-crowd-sourcing","tag-google","tag-inspiration","tag-jaron-lanier"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/stephaniegolden.net\/writing_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/stephaniegolden.net\/writing_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/stephaniegolden.net\/writing_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/stephaniegolden.net\/writing_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/stephaniegolden.net\/writing_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=197"}],"version-history":[{"count":30,"href":"http:\/\/stephaniegolden.net\/writing_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":457,"href":"http:\/\/stephaniegolden.net\/writing_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197\/revisions\/457"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/stephaniegolden.net\/writing_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=197"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/stephaniegolden.net\/writing_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=197"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/stephaniegolden.net\/writing_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=197"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}