Reading print-on-paper books about the fragmentation of texts and the freeing of information seems fitting. Jaron Lanier admits as much in the opening to You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto (see review, LJ 12/09, p. 131, bit.ly/LJSciTech1209). “The words in this book are written for people, not computers...,” he writes.

When we first heard concerns about the “atomization of text” in libraryland, it was from the pen of then–American Library Association president Michael Gorman, back when most of us were still writing online using more than 140 characters at a time. He talked about the endless repurposing of information and the implications for us in our roles as so-called “information professionals.”

Web 2.0 and Library 2.0 hit big and hit hard. Now even Gorman has been spotted blogging at the Encyclopedia Britannica, and some of our Senators give their constituents updates in chatspeak. How are we feeling? What's the collective temperature?

Lanier's new book is a critical response to Web 2.0 and “hive mind” thinking. I've had Lanier on my radar since he wrote about virtual reality in the 1980s, but he made a splash in library circles with his 2006 essay “Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism,” a cautionary tale about the problems inherent in the much-lauded wisdom of crowds concept. This new book is an expansion of those ideas and others. I asked him about some of the more book- and library-oriented ones.

JW I work with people in the public library world who are dipping their toes into Web 2.0, seeing it as a way to do outreach. A lot of them aren't totally into it. Is the 2.0 world something that you need to understand fully before you back off from it, or can you just say, “OK, take my word for it: Facebook isn't the way forward”?

JL Well, if you're going to engage with this stuff at all, engage with it at a level that's deeper and broader than at the level that's presented to you by the vendor. So, sure, try Facebook if you like, but remember that Facebook itself is a recent design and a very small idea, in a way, in a long stream of ideas.

What I'm much more concerned about is myopia, where people try Facebook and Twitter and believe that's the universe and that that's the Internet. And, also, the ideas that are embedded or implied about personhood, authorship, or communication within those designs is what technology means, and that's all wrong. So, what I hope the book accomplishes is broadening those basic ideas so people don't have this myopia. By all means, try these things, but just remember, they're small. Don't believe that they represent the whole thing to be evaluated or thought about. That's the danger here.

One of the things you talk about as a good way forward is the idea of global micropayments. I sort of like the ISP-we-pay-for-bits model you provide: that we can be online as long as we pay for or contribute content. Any ideas about how we move more toward that?

Getting from here to there is always the trickiest thing in any aspect of life, so I didn't go into that in great detail in the book. I can imagine various scenarios. For instance, at some point...essentially now, China is going to be sick of the idea that we're the designers and they're the manufacturers, and they'll start designing on their own, and then, before too long, some American manufacturer will rip off a Chinese designer and the Chinese will be upset about it.

The same sort of thing will happen for a lot of countries. Then there might be enough international pressure for some sort of convention on intellectual property. What this is about is a social contract, which will come about when enough people perceive self-interest in a system that defers gratification.

The reason we don't just go in and steal from every house or car or sleep in every house we come to even though it may be more convenient than making it home to our own house is that we've all bought into the idea that that bit of deferred gratification overall is better for us, and that's what makes a social contract. Enough people have to feel that they've been wronged by the system before there can be that perception—that accurate perception—of shared interest in a better system. Back to questions as to “How?” I'm suspecting that it'll be international.... The United States will be dragged into it by international interests eventually....

Maybe it's 100 years from now. I don't know.

Some people may live their entire lives before we get to whatever that utopia is at the end of the rainbow, so we have to make sure we're laying the groundwork so people have decent lives now in addition to preparing for whatever this future thing is.

That's such a good point. The original version of the book had the John Lennon quote in it: “Life is what happens while you're making other plans.” The notion that if we wait long enough somehow writers will make a living in some untold way. Just wait, just wait, just wait. The problem is, we're human, and we're not machines with immortality, even if we want to pretend to be. The only possible benefit we can hope to achieve is the transient temporary one, for mortals. That's the only good that we have an ability to address.

I appreciate your view, “Look, I've done this. I've been there.

And I use an iPhone. I'm on the web and I interact with music people in an online forum and I take advantage but I'm not closed-eyed to the problems that are inherent in exactly the same stuff. Nobody lives on a mountain-top.”

It's very important to me that people realize that I'm pro-technology in any general sense. I mean, I think I'm pro-Internet.

I always look forward to being summarized as an Internet critic, which couldn't be further from the truth. A Web 2.0 critic, I'll accept.

What do you think is coming for publishing generally speaking and the idea of words on a page? How can information managers in a library environment either help influence public opinion or help content creators?

If I were a librarian now, I would attempt to conceive of the library from an experiential point of view. I would say, “What is the experience that is missing from the agora, from the world out there, from the private home? What is the experience that's missing that we need in order to be human, in order to think, in order to consider?”

My own take on it would be that information availability in some sort of raw form is not a problem anymore, because of the Internet. It is for some people, as you well know; not everyone has Internet access or equal Internet access. Acknowledging all of that and just speaking in a very crude way that ignores [the digital divide] for a moment...if somebody has broadband at home, if they're affluent, it doesn't mean they have all they need. They still, in many cases, lack the time and space really to think in their lives. And, gradually, libraries will take on the role in civilization of providing that space. I don't think the home will provide it anymore.

The thinking space where people can get to know themselves and get their ideas cogently arranged or what have you…

So the cliché of the librarian going, “Shhhhhhhhh....”

Oh, are we tired of that!

I'm sure you are, but, in a way, that is going to become something that is so desperately desired that I have a feeling there will be a new life for the library in which it provides the thinking space for civilization.

For instance, my book.... [A]t one point [I] had the most overdue book contract in New York publishing. It's over 20 years or something. And the reason is I have such a crazy, busy life, and I have so many things going on. I was in London some years…ago and a friend of mine, who's a writer, said, “The only way you're going to write a book is in a library” and sat me down in this wonderful, big library [the British Library].

It has amazing incunabula suspended in this glass cube inside the foyer, and you can see scholars wandering around inside the stacks. I sat down in that place and actually had the quietude to...write a book. So this book wouldn't exist without a library.

We must have 10,000 or 15,000 books in our house. We have one room that's…basically a mountain of books. It's become impassable. So we have no lack of access to material, and yet I didn't have access to my own head until I went to the library. So to me there's clearly something missing in the formula that we're developing for civilization.... I think the library will naturally come to fill that gap. Making the library into some sort of alternate Facebook access point is exactly the wrong way to achieve that.