Framing Week 5: You are Not a Gadget

In Jason Lanier’s, “You Are Not a Gadget,” he discusses how the Internet we know today was built on the first web designers programming and software decisions. What initial decisions have had the biggest impacts on our modern Internet? What has provided problems and what has given us success in our World Wide Web?

In Lanier’s opening paragraph, he says: “most of the ideas that have been locked in so far are not so bad, but some of the so-called web 2.0 ideas are stinkers, so we ought to reject them while we still can” (3). What are these so-called stinkers? Twitter? Foursquare? How can we analyze which social networks are stinkers and which are not?

Lanier says, “technologies are extensions of ourselves” (4). I really like this quote and the whole idea of technology affecting our behaviors and experiences. I would like to spend some time in my response blog talking more about Lanier’s ideas on this concept.