If you love a medium made of software, there's a danger that you will become entrapped in someone else's recent careless thoughts. Struggle against that.
Interpretation
Be cautious of the influences that software and technology can have on your thoughts and creativity.
In this quote, Jaron Lanier warns us about the pitfalls of becoming too attached to technology, particularly software, which may lead to adopting uncritical thoughts or opinions from others. It emphasizes the importance of maintaining independent thinking and the need to actively resist the passive consumption of information generated by others.
In practice
During a technology conference, this quote could be used to provoke discussion about digital media literacy.
Pop culture has entered into a nostalgic malaise. Online culture is dominated by trivial mashups of the culture that existed before the onset of mashups, and by fandom responding to the dwindling outposts of centralized mass media. It is a culture of reaction without action.
We're losing track of the vastness of the potential for computer science. We really have to revive the beautiful intellectual joy of it, as opposed to the business potential.
Separation anxiety is assuaged by constant connection. Young people announce every detail of their lives on services like Twitter not to show off, but to avoid the closed door at bedtime, the empty room, the screaming vacuum of an isolated mind.
Web 2.0 ideas have a chirpy, cheerful rhetoric to them, but I think they consistently express a profound pessimism about humans, human nature and the human future.
Facebook says, 'Privacy is theft,' because they're selling your lack of privacy to the advertisers who might show up one day.
I mean, you can't have advertising be the only official business of the information economy if the information economy is going to take over.
Free software is software that respects your freedom and the social solidarity of your community. So it's free as in freedom.
If old consumers were assumed to be passive, then new consumers are active. If old consumers were predictable and stayed where you told them, then new consumers are migratory, showing a declining loyalty to networks or media. If old consumers were isolated individuals, then new consumers are more socially connected. If the work of media consumers was once silent and invisible, then new consumers are now noisy and public.
Right, and you point out something important which is that people who donβt want to pay, people who are pirates, donβt get bothered by the DRM, they go out and buy the cracked books or download the cracked books for free. Itβs only people who are foolish enough to pay for them that get locked into these platforms.
When something is such a creative medium as the web, the limits to it are our imagination.
The speed of communications is wondrous to behold. It is also true that speed can multiply the distribution of information that we know to be untrue.
The consumer is deciding what they want to see and when and how, and filmmakers are more aware and accepting of the fact that success is not predicated on your movie showing in a traditional theater for a certain amount of time.
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