

You Are Not a Gadget- A Case Against Web 2.0 - brennannovak
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/you_are_not_a_gadget_web_20.php

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donaq
_The central mistake of recent digital culture is to chop up a network of
individuals so finely that you end up with a mush. You then start to care
about the abstraction of the network more than the real people who are
networked, even though the network by itself is meaningless. Only the people
were ever meaningful._

I think aggregated behavior is interesting. While it may be true that
Wikipedia and Facebook (and perhaps even more pertinently, 4chan) are networks
of individuals chopped into a "mush", each of these resulting mushes has its
own unique character and identity. A mega-individual, if you will. I can't see
how he could consider that meaningless.

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teilo
I wish that guys like this would be more specific than "Web 2.0". That phrase
has become so overloaded that it is now meaningless.

What is he against, exactly? Curvy pastel controls? Cloud computing? Ajax?
Quick access to useful information? Social networking? What? I believe he
means "crowd sourcing". That is a term with a specific meaning. He should use
it.

And of course, because we have crowd-sourcing, and the benefits it has
brought, individual expression is dying. Fewer and fewer people blog their own
thoughts. Expressions of one's artistic individuality on the internet are few
and far between. Riiiiight.

The internet reflects reality. The reality is that there have always been a
whole lot of groupies and trend-followers. And there have been a much smaller
number of people who forge their own path.

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wtn
Wikipedia is a relatively reliable source for information on controversial
political topics. Simply stated, Wikipedia editors tend to be a lot more anal
about facts and details than policy makers and journalists. It's also an
excellent source for information about marginal ideas.

Either Lanier doesn't have much of a case or MacManus does a poor job of
summarizing the book.

