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A review by dunguyen
You Are Not a Gadget by Jaron Lanier
1.0
Jaron Lanier's You are not a gadget is his take on technology and web 2.0. Several themes go through the book among these are: loss of humanity through the rise of computing, loss of creativity through lock-in - the effect of a bad design that has become too ingrained, the economic imbalance in the tech world and some other minor themes.
You cannot get past that Lanier has some interesting thoughts. Some I do agree with and some I think Lanier exaggerates and never really argues for completely. The book started really well though and was very well formulated but it did not take long before the red thread was lost and Lanier shifting between themes. At one point in chapter 2 he refers to chapter 14! As I got along in the book it seemed to be less about the humanistic point of view and instead just a random collection of thoughts.
Lanier's use of language is often too formulaic as well and the language is more complicated than it has to be. The format of the book is really confusing as well and on a single page I counted 3 different fonts in 5 different font sizes!
I really wanted to like this book as the premise is interesting but apart from maybe the first 4 chapters it is really not worth reading.
You cannot get past that Lanier has some interesting thoughts. Some I do agree with and some I think Lanier exaggerates and never really argues for completely. The book started really well though and was very well formulated but it did not take long before the red thread was lost and Lanier shifting between themes. At one point in chapter 2 he refers to chapter 14! As I got along in the book it seemed to be less about the humanistic point of view and instead just a random collection of thoughts.
Lanier's use of language is often too formulaic as well and the language is more complicated than it has to be. The format of the book is really confusing as well and on a single page I counted 3 different fonts in 5 different font sizes!
I really wanted to like this book as the premise is interesting but apart from maybe the first 4 chapters it is really not worth reading.