You are Not a Gadget - by Cathy W.  Welcome to our new blogger
Cathy, who says of her reading tastes, "I love all kinds of
books, music, films, comics, zines and web stuff. Basically, I
eat from all 5 food groups, including junk food." More about
Cathy and all of our bloggers here.  Back in the 1980s and
1990s, if someone called you the L word, if it didn’t refer to
your sexuality, it meant you’d been outed as a liberal. But that
L word is so last century. In today’s hallowed halls of Web 2.0,
the latest 12th-letter indictment is Luddite. So why is Jaron
Lanier, a Silicon Valley visionary, musician, and one of the
web’s big supporters in the 1980s, now having to fend off that
label? Lanier’s recent book You Are Not a Gadget- a self-
proclaimed manifesto - is his answer to all the mudslingers.  I
love how this book asks lots of “taboo” questions about the Web.
His FAQs preface the book by saying “it ought to be possible to
criticize aspects of digital experience without criticizing the
whole of it.” Here are ju