Anyone heard of Jaron Lanier

I read a book by this guy last year. Thought it was worth mentioning him as he is somewhat of a cyber-philosopher/critic. He is a computer scientist and has some interesting criticisms of current cyber-culture in general, including criticisms of Social Objects (SO's) and social networking sites. He encourages people to create their own blogs from the ground up and not rely on pre-made formats for their online identities. He acknowledges that many of his opinions are not shared by his collegues.




His criticism aims at several targets which are at different level of abstraction:

* any attempt to create one final authoritative bottleneck which channels the knowledge onto society is wrong, regardless whether it is a Wikipedia or any algorithmically created system producing meta informations,
* sterile style of wiki writing is undesirable because:
o it removes the touch with the real author of original information, it filters the subtlety of his opinions, essential information (e.g. incl. graphical context of original sources) is lost,
o it creates the false sense of authority behind the information,
* collective authorship tends to produce or align to mainstream or organizational beliefs,
* he worries that collectively created works may be manipulated behind the scene by anonymous groups of editors who bear no visible responsibility,
o and that this kind of activity might create future totalitarian systems as these are basically grounded on misbehaved collectives which oppress individuals.


NOTE: the above dot points are taken from wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaron_Lanier). Funnily enough I don't think this source of information would be something that approved of by the aforementioned author.