You are not a gadget, progress is not a widget

My most positive takeaway from the book is that there is still a lot of room to create new social interaction models for the internet. It doesn't have to stay fragmentary and relatively meaningless, as in status updates.<p>The dangers Lanier describes in the new Internet represent opportunity for the person that can turn them on their head and figure out cool ways to promote individual expression.<p>The most negative takeaway is that the Web 2.0 medium is altering what we remember how to say. We start writing things so they can be Googled, or so they can be read by all our facebook friends. He definitely touched a nerve here.

<i>"'In a quarter century, when the digital revolution has made great progress and computer chips are millions of times faster than they are now, humanity will finally win the prize of being able to write a new encyclopedia and a new version of UNIX!' It would have sounded utterly pathetic."</i><p>No, pathetic is sitting on your own ass, reducing the last 25 years to Wikipedia and Linux while dismissing even those, and implicitly demanding that everyone produce something for you that's <i>cooler</i>.<p>You want something cooler because nobody's even really trying? <i>Make it.</i>

the most important book about the internet in a decade. and the internet is about a decade old really. so this must be the most important book ever.