All Annotations of BBC NEWS | Technology | Web 2.0's 'digital mobs' attacked[Preview]

saved bytony curzon price on 2007-02-22

• Jaron Lanier, who popularised the virtual reality concept in the early 1980s, said that in rush to forge a new age of collectivism, we risk losing individual identities and dumbing down our understanding of the world.
  

  
  He told BBC World Service's Culture Shock that his main problem is that in places like the blogosphere or the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia, people no longer treat or respect each other as individuals.
  

  
  "We have these designs on the internet where a whole bunch of people work together anonymously - a mob, in my opinion - in order to do something," he said.
  

  
  "They actually take on the emotional quality of a mob - they become mean, they tend to insult each other a lot more than they would if they knew who each other were. In my opinion, this is an example of a design that isn't so great."

• Lanier is among a small group leading a backlash against web 2.0 - the term coined to describe the latest internet era, in which collective ideas and participation take over from individual authorship.

• He coined the term "digital Maoism" in a recent article, and explained that it was not meant entirely as an insult, but a reference to the notion that individual variations between people are negative and that "somehow, the masses of people will always be right".
  

  
  And he said that there is currently an "avalanche" of new companies being funded by investors in Silicon Valley that are designed to harvest the wisdom of the collective.

• The latest phase of internet - web 2.0 - has been attacked by a leading author and digital pioneer for its "mob" mentality, describing it as "digital Maoism".