How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves the Way We Work and Live
Simon & Schuster
October 2011
On Sale: September 27, 2011
272 pages ISBN: 1451636008 EAN: 9781451636000 Kindle: B004W3FZ0Q Hardcover / e-Book Add to Wish List
A visionary and optimistic thinker examines the tension
between privacy and publicness that is transforming how we
form communities, create identities, do business, and live
our lives.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. New tools
let us share our photos, videos, purchases, knowledge,
friendships, locations, and lives.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.Based on extensive interviews, Public Parts
introduces us to the men and women building a new industry
based on sharing. Some of them have become household
names—Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Google’s Eric Schmidt, and
Twitter’s Evan Williams. Others may soon be recognized as
the industrialists, philosophers, and designers of our
future. Jarvis explores the promising ways in which the
internet and publicness allow us to collaborate, think,
ways—how we manufacture and market, buy and sell, organize
and govern, teach and learn. He also examines the necessity
as well as the limits of privacy in an effort to understand
and thus protect it. This new and open era has already
profoundly disrupted economies, industries, laws, ethics,
childhood, and many other facets of our daily lives. But the
change has just begun. The shape of the future is not
assured. The amazing new tools of publicness can be used to
good ends and bad. The choices—and the responsibilities—lie
with us. Jarvis makes an urgent case that the future of the
internet—what one technologist calls “the eighth
continent”—requires as much protection as the physical space
we share, the air we breathe, and the rights we afford one
another. It is a space of the public, for the public, and by
the public. It needs protection and respect from all of us.
As Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in the wake of
the uprisings in the Middle East, “If people around the
world are going to come together every day online and have a
safe and productive experience, we need a shared vision to
guide us.” Jeff Jarvis has that vision and will be that guide.
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