I don't know. It's an interesting subject, but reading from the interview it kinda sounds like he's making stuff up. Computer scientist does not equal psychologist/sociologist.

I would have to read it I guess.

He's a serious writer, though. He has some kind of honorary position as an adviser to Microsoft and at the University of California . I for one was pleased to hear a dissenting voice on the impact of the Web instead of the usual Ooh Aah Isn't It All Fantastic. I have been in and around the tech industry since before the WWW started, and I see a lot of 'cyber-serfdom' out there.

We are, it seems, now beginning to think through some of the problems that have arisen from the importance of the Internet; as with any technology, there are opportunities for great benefit to mankind, as well as the opposite, and I think Lanier's warning to be as reasonable and applicable as it is important.

I found the information at Amazon, including user reviews, interesting on several points -- don't worry, I haven't really thought through many of them, so this post will only address one.

The issue that I'd be most interested in hearing others' opinions on is how internet protocol "stifes creativity". That's not something I'd notice since I've always been oriented towards collecting and preserving tradition, history, or critiquing (in debate, I was much better at negative than affirmative). How do those gifted with the creative impulse feel about Lanier's arguments on this point?

Well among other things I am a musician and composer. I have devoted a lot of my life to it, at one stage under the illusion that I would make something out of it. As is so often the case, nothing whatever has come of it, but I continue to work at it.

Now there are a billion websites out there where you, too, can upload your song ideas, and get an audience. We also now have the most amazing studio technology on desktop computers - I have Logic on an iMac, and the quality of the sounds is just amazing. In 1989 this functionality would have cost you about $200,000. If you have the dexterity and ideas, you can create studio-quality music with this gear.

Now I regard myself as quite creative - not genius level, but genuinely original and technically more competent than many. But go through the loop of uploading some of your material to these sites. It is utterly soul-destroying. Your little song, the thing that expresses some important aspect of your sensibility, is now just one among 30 million files being feverishly created by 20 million wannabees, all with the latest digital sound technolology, etc etc....

More and more, I am just playing good ol' piano now. That is one thing you can't do on a computer.

As regards 'cyberculture', a sickening note from today's news. A poor 12-yo boy was fatally stabbed in a schoolyard brawl yesterday, in a private school, in Brisbane. His friends, as they often do, put up a tribute site on Facebook. For the first few hours, it was all tributes. Apparently, by this morning, the page had been thoroughly trashed with a number of obscene messages and images of both paedophillia and bestiality. Facebook deleted it.

Now who did this? I would hazard a guess that it is the work of a whole bunch of other 12 or 13 year olds. I shudder to think of the damage being wrought on young minds by the kind of material that is freely avaiable in cyberspace. Now I don't want to open that can of worms again, it has been thoroughly canvassed on a few other threads, but again, this naive idea that 'Information wants to be free' and 'the more information the better' really needs to be criticized.

An extract from a E-mail from a friend (alas without a link to the original newspaper source):

Professor Barrie Gunter, head of mass communications at Leicester University, points out that the technology itself is not to blame for such [on-line] viciousness. "The problem stems from the way people are able to operate anonymously; it is this that can be used as a force for evil. People can behave in a way online that they would never do in the normal, offline world. In the real world, social etiquette restrains people from doing and saying certain things. That restraint does not seem to be apparent on the internet."

It is not just the anonymity of the internet, it is its speed and ease of use that allow things to run away with themselves. A poison-pen letter or ill-tempered missive to the local paper required time as well as a stamp. Now, it is a simple matter of cutting, pasting and clicking.

Of course, this swiftness can be a force for amazing good. Small causes can reach a global audience within hours, as Charlie Simpson found out. The seven-year-old from Fulham, London hoped to raise ?500 for the Haiti relief effort by undertaking a sponsored bicycle ride around his local park.***** He soon raised ?200,000, appeared on the national news and was praised by Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister. All thanks to a simple internet page.