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Convenience always costs

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It’s time for you to meet Jaron Lanier, computer scientist and virtual reality  pioneer . Several of Lanier’s ideas sit at the very centre of this project’s philosophy; these will be explored in-depth later. Since the publication of his first two books You Are Not A Gadget and Who Owns The Future? Lanier is often asked to explain and expand on his criticism of social media sites. 1 Given Facebook’s most recent presence in the press, it made sense for Lanier to speak out about the company. Speaking to CNBC in the US, he encouraged support for those leaving Facebook and reassured us that there is life after the social network: “We’re not citizens of Facebook, we have no vote on Facebook, it’s not a democracy and this process is not a way we can design the future, we can’t rely on this single company to invent our digital future in such a big way. When people delete, it’s not so much that they’re effective protesters, it’s that they’re inventing what life can be like without F
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Why would you say that?

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Could Facebook be putting words in your mouth? One of the questions at the centre of this project is Do we need to change our attitudes to publishing online? The term ‘publishing’ tends to create thoughts of the gatekeepers of the printing press, with ability to transform you into the next JK Rowling.  The reality is we all publish every single day, submitting an array of media from text and images to audio and video, in the form of tweets, posts and statuses. If you so much as post a comment on social media, you are publishing online. Arguably the most prominent social media platform is Facebook. With over two billion active monthly users , it has rapidly transformed over the past decade or so from a directory of your friends, to a source of news, entertainment and much more. Its success is founded upon the idea that everything is better with friends, as well as several definitive innovations, most famously the News Feed. Once upon a time, Facebook’s News Fe
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