Jaron Lanier

After reading Part 1 of Jaron Lanier's You are Not a Gadget and discussing it in class today, I gained a totally new understanding of the modern Internet. Aside from all the good that it appears to do, we were faced by some of the grim realities of the destructiveness of the Internet. While the Internet does allow people to be their own individual selves by creating profiles and creating a persona, this is often used with negative intentions. The online culture that has been created has allowed people to criticize one another through a completely impersonal channel. With this being the case, while the Internet is allowing people to be more connected, it is also leading to a complete disconnect among people. The ability to be an anonymous individual with the means to say anything about any material that may be posted on the Internet has allowed people to create new persona's that may destroy others. In certain cases that Lanier cites, these critiques have led to personal attacks as well as suicides. These undoubtedly are not things that we commonly think of when we think of the Internet. We think of all the good it has done and how great a job has done in bringing us together. We never think about the negative aspects of the Internet. However as Lanier exposes in the first section of his book, we need to be able to face the harsh reality that the Internet can also be an extremely destructive force.