<i>The central mistake of recent digital culture is to chop up a network of individuals so finely that you end up with a mush. You then start to care about the abstraction of the network more than the real people who are networked, even though the network by itself is meaningless. Only the people were ever meaningful.</i><p>I think aggregated behavior is interesting. While it may be true that Wikipedia and Facebook (and perhaps even more pertinently, 4chan) are networks of individuals chopped into a "mush", each of these resulting mushes has its own unique character and identity. A mega-individual, if you will. I can't see how he could consider that meaningless.
I wish that guys like this would be more specific than "Web 2.0". That phrase has become so overloaded that it is now meaningless.<p>What is he against, exactly? Curvy pastel controls? Cloud computing? Ajax? Quick access to useful information? Social networking? What? I believe he means "crowd sourcing". That is a term with a specific meaning. He should use it.<p>And of course, because we have crowd-sourcing, and the benefits it has brought, individual expression is dying. Fewer and fewer people blog their own thoughts. Expressions of one's artistic individuality on the internet are few and far between. Riiiiight.<p>The internet reflects reality. The reality is that there have always been a whole lot of groupies and trend-followers. And there have been a much smaller number of people who forge their own path.
Wikipedia is a relatively reliable source for information on controversial political topics. Simply stated, Wikipedia editors tend to be a lot more anal about facts and details than policy makers and journalists. It's also an excellent source for information about marginal ideas.<p>Either Lanier doesn't have much of a case or MacManus does a poor job of summarizing the book.