Festival of Ideas for the New City: Jaron Lanier Keynote "The City as Acuity Chamber"
Posted in: Uncategorized
If you haven’t read You are Not a Gadget by Jaron Lanier yet, please do.
Called by The New York Times as one of the “Best books of 2010,” You Are Not a Gadget offers a powerful and thoughtful critique of Web 2.0 culture.
Lanier is wary of human comparisons to machines. Coming from a roboticist, this is a stiff charge.
The human eye has sensors responsive even to a single photon. Lanier calls this fineness of perception and mobility ‘acuity’: The ability of humans to finely adjust the information we actively seek. Compare this with a camera, which only passively receives information. In this sense, our vision functions less like a camera and more like a spy submarine, constantly gathering information about our surroundings.
He asks: what if we apply this principle of human acuity to the level of the city? In that case, a city like New York can act as a kind of acuity chamber or amplifier. What a person experiences, even when walking down the street, is amplified in an urban environment like New York. The fates of people in a city like New York are intertwined with their acuity, more so than in, say for example, Omaha.
Post a Comment