The Unbearable Thinness of Flatness

A summary of:
Lanier, J. (2010). You Are Not A Gadget: A Manifesto. Allen Lane: London.
Part 3, Chapters 9-11: The Unbearable Thinness of Flatness

"Flatness" is the term that Lanier uses to describe the way that each new technology is made using the same resources as every other one (120), which "reifies our philosophies through the process of lock-in before we are ready" (119).

One manifestation of this flatness is the way in which, with all of the promise of newness afforded by web 2.0, we are in a creative rut, stuck trying to recreate earlier technologies. It is kind of bizarre that the most celebrated web 2.0 output is a reinterpretation on a pretty bland creation, the encyclopedia.

We will know we have made progress if we manage to generate entirely new things with the internet. In a way, this is a variation on the architectural notion of "truth to materials." Why do we seek to digitize things that were perfectly good non-digital creations? We should be using technology to enable us to do things that we never could have before. This requires us to be creative in our technological designs. As Lanier correctly notes, "Making echoes of this material in the radical, new, 'open' world accomplishes nothing. The cumulative result is that online culture is fixated on the world as it was before the web was born" (123). Put another way, "Freedom is moot if you waste it" (131).

Lanier suggests we ought to rethink the idea that open source is the answer in all cases; that it is "automatically the best path to creativity and innovation is not borne out by the facts" (126).

He also suggests that we continually seek closer and closer simulacrums, because "what makes something real is that it is impossible to represent it to completion" (133).

One of the tradeoffs we've accepted for supposed freedoms in web 2.0 is that we now have a disconnect between numerical popularity and intensity of connections with people in the cloud (137). Furthermore, technologies like Wikipedia make us (and search engines) lazy (143): we automatically defer to it as the easy truth.

To overcome this, we may want to develop alternatives for interaction that allow for greater contextualization.

And before we idolize a technology, we need to consider what life would be like without it. Would the world cease to exist without Wikipedia? If not, if nothing is lost, how valuable is it really? Lanier writes, "It seems to me that if Wikipedia suddenly disappeared, similar information would still be available for the most part, but in more contextualized forms, with more visibility for the authors and with a greater sense of style and presence" (143). That its form might be less consistent (i.e. non-standardized) may in fact be a blessing. What's wrong with a bit of human touch? This would be a nice relief from the otherwise constant promotion of the idea that the collective can better provide "truth" than an individual. Two heads are better than one, we say; but we also say that too many cooks spoil the broth.

An example of this possibly better encyclopedia is that produced by ThinkQuest, which required contestants to learn how to "present their ideas as wholes, as well as figure out how to use the new online medium to do that" (146). This reinforces highly valuable skills! These are things we should cultivate!