I'm halfway through his book You Are Not a Gadget and I give it very low marks so far, but not for the writing or the ideas presented -- the latter of which, however, is disappointingly nebulous. The main problem is that Lanier consistently chooses poor examples to make a point and presents very little real evidence to support his claims. He mainly complains a lot about fuzzy circumstances and persuades very little.
For example, on page 12 Lanier elucidates the idea that "entrenched software philosophies become invisible through ubiquity." It begins, "An even deeper locked-in idea is the notion of the file. Once upon a time, not too long ago, plenty of computer scientists thought the idea of the file was not so great." The section ends, "The idea of the file has become so big that we are unable to conceive of a frame large enough to fit around it in order to assess it empirically."
In between are three sparse paragraphs. The first paragraph mentions Xanadu and the original iteration of the Mac OS as examples of systems that didn't use files. The second and third paragraphs complain that now every system uses files, that we're locked in to using filesystems, and we can't even conceive of systems without files.
At this point while reading I'm very curious about Xanadu and trying to conceive of file-less systems myself. I'm desperately waiting for the author to support the analogy, but he quickly moves on to claim that "[lock-in] could happen soon to the definition of a human being."
Wait, what? Stop, and tell me about these file-less organizational systems. Why can't we conceive of them anymore? Why didn't they gain traction? Prove to me that we're really locked-in and that's a bad thing. I'm not accepting your segue -- how exactly is this a worthy example for your larger point?
And so it goes. I've picked one example, but it's truly page after page of baseless assumptions, spacey ideas, thin examples, and doubtful conclusions. Where is the evidence? I'm screaming at the pages imagining my high school english teacher scribbling "illustrate!" in red ink across the margins.
"... In between are three sparse paragraphs. The first paragraph mentions Xanadu and the original iteration of the Mac OS as examples of systems that didn't use files. The second and third paragraphs complain that now every system uses files, that we're locked in to using filesystems, and we can't even conceive of systems without files. ..."
Try reading up on Andrew Pam. I met Andrew for lunch one day around '95 and remember him talking about Xanadu ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu running on a new fangled thing called a "Be Box" ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeBox At one stage you could buy the software with a book in bookshops and I remember looking at it. WWW was more interesting.
Some have mentioned that the iPhone/iPad (and probably other mobile platforms) are moving consumers away from file based computing (even if the specific OSes underneath are using them). Each application in the iphone doesn't really think about files, but more objects and persistent data or the network resources.
For example, on page 12 Lanier elucidates the idea that "entrenched software philosophies become invisible through ubiquity." It begins, "An even deeper locked-in idea is the notion of the file. Once upon a time, not too long ago, plenty of computer scientists thought the idea of the file was not so great." The section ends, "The idea of the file has become so big that we are unable to conceive of a frame large enough to fit around it in order to assess it empirically."
In between are three sparse paragraphs. The first paragraph mentions Xanadu and the original iteration of the Mac OS as examples of systems that didn't use files. The second and third paragraphs complain that now every system uses files, that we're locked in to using filesystems, and we can't even conceive of systems without files.
At this point while reading I'm very curious about Xanadu and trying to conceive of file-less systems myself. I'm desperately waiting for the author to support the analogy, but he quickly moves on to claim that "[lock-in] could happen soon to the definition of a human being."
Wait, what? Stop, and tell me about these file-less organizational systems. Why can't we conceive of them anymore? Why didn't they gain traction? Prove to me that we're really locked-in and that's a bad thing. I'm not accepting your segue -- how exactly is this a worthy example for your larger point?
And so it goes. I've picked one example, but it's truly page after page of baseless assumptions, spacey ideas, thin examples, and doubtful conclusions. Where is the evidence? I'm screaming at the pages imagining my high school english teacher scribbling "illustrate!" in red ink across the margins.