Yesterday I started reading Jaron Lanier’s [amazon_link id=”0307389979″ target=”_blank” ]You Are Not A Gadget[/amazon_link]. The intro to the paperback recommends an E.M. Forster story, The Machine Stops, calling it a “preternatural oracle of internet culture”. I must say, the theme of the story seems to me the highly familiar one of ‘techno-anxiety (over-dependence)’. I’m sure I read something similar by Andre Norton or Ursula Leguin in my teens – kudos to anyone who can remember which novel I mean. However, reading the Forster (‘Only connect!’) has certainly illustrated Lanier’s mindset, so I know more or less what to expect from You Are Not A Gadget.
[amazon_image id=”0307389979″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto (Vintage)[/amazon_image]
Hi Diane – I read “You Are Not A Gadget” last year and liked it a lot. See this:
http://nickreynoldsatwork.wordpress.com/2010/04/17/you-are-not-a-gadget/
Cheers!
I wrote an article about the Forster story for a magazine three years ago (the article was rejected) noting that while everyone uses “the machine” so that there is no real digital divide (I was in a meeting a few days ago about a project for financial services for the elderly and it turned out that something like 9 in 10 of the target group had broadband) there is still an impending digital divide between people who use the machine to create and those who use it to consume.
I’ve not read the Lanier but I heard him on a podcast (can’t remember which one) and I didn’t buy it.