Public Parts, Jeff Jarvis
Public Parts, Jeff Jarvis
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Public Parts
How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves the Way We Work and Live

Author: Jeff Jarvis

Narrator: Jeff Jarvis

Unabridged: 8 hr 17 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 09/27/2011


Synopsis

International bestselling author and optimistic internet thinker Jeff Jarvis examines the way the Internet has changed the way we form communities, create identities, engage in commerce, and live our lives.

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.

About Jeff Jarvis

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. Join the conversation at buzzmachine.com/publicparts and on Twitter (@jeffjarvis and #publicparts).


Reviews

Goodreads review by André on October 29, 2011

I had been looking forward to this book for months. When it came out, I was glad I didn't have to camp in front of a bookstore to get my copy — it was delivered wirelessly to my e-reader a few seconds after publication. And yet, having read it, I cannot deny a mild sense of disappointment. I feel a b......more

Goodreads review by Luke on October 09, 2011

I listened to this one instead of reading it. Jeff Jarvis is a good narrator of his own material. The content is very interesting, though only a few parts are brand new if you are a regular listener to the This Week in Google podcast. What it does do is set out all the concepts and thoughts very cle......more

Goodreads review by Megan on September 05, 2012

In this book, Jeff Jarvis writes as an advocate for the public culture the Internet has fostered. While at times I would call him overly optimistic, he highlights ways that the Internet’s culture of publicness has positively affected our lives. He discusses the meaning of public versus private, what......more

Goodreads review by Simon on April 30, 2014

In Public Parts, Jeff Jarvis counterbalances arguments about the sinister effects of erosion of privacy in the modern world. He argues that openness and sharing, on balance, improve the world. He coins the word 'publicness' to describe open sharing, and argues convincingly that 'publicness' is not t......more

Goodreads review by Jenny on August 10, 2012

Interesting plea for publicness, which I agree with, for the most part, and it made me think about the choices I make and why I make them - and re-affirmed my opinions and choices. Here's what I want to remember: The 1999 quote from Douglas Adams: "I suppose earlier generations had to sit through all t......more