Jeff Jarvis on Public Parts: How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves the Way We Work and Live
Channel: The Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society
Date: 05/01/2012

Thanks to the internet, we now live — more and more — in public. More than 750 million people (and half of all Americans) use Facebook, where we share a billion times a day. The collective voice of Twitter echoes instantly 100 million times daily, from Tahrir Square to the Mall of America, on subjects that range from democratic reform to unfolding natural disasters to celebrity gossip.

Yet change brings fear, and many people—nostalgic for a more homogeneous mass culture and provoked by well-meaning advocates for privacy—despair that the internet and how we share there is making us dumber, crasser, distracted, and vulnerable to threats of all kinds. But not Jeff Jarvis.

In this shibboleth-destroying book, Public Parts argues persuasively and personally that the internet and our new sense of publicness are, in fact, doing the opposite. Jarvis travels back in time to show the amazing parallels of fear and resistance that met the advent of other innovations such as the camera and the printing press. The internet, he argues, will change business, society, and life as profoundly as Gutenberg's invention, shifting power from old institutions to us all.

About Jeff
Jeff Jarvis blogs about media, news, technology, and business at Buzzmachine.com, and appears weekly as a co-host on Leo Laporte's "This Week in Google." He is associate professor and director of the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at the City University of New York's Graduate School of Journalism. The author of What Would Google Do?, he lives in the New York area.

More about this event here: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/luncheon/2011/12/jarvis