By Jeff Jarvis, Simon

ISBN 1451636008

Due to the internet, we now live — more and more — in public. More than 600 million people use Facebook, where we share a billion times a day. The collective voice of Twitter echoes 100 million times daily from Tahrir Square to the Mall of America, on subjects ranging from democratic reform 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, Jarvis argues persuasively and personally that the Internet and our new sense of publicness are, in fact, doing the opposite. Based on extensive interviews, Jarvis introduces us to the men and women building a new industry built on sharing, from Facebook ’ s Mark Zuckerberg to Twitter ’ s Evan Williams, and traces the history of technological change, showing how similar anxieties and opportunities framed the emergence of the printing press and later the camera. Along the way, 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 and the rights we afford one another.

It is a space of the public, for the public, and by the public. It needs respect and protection from all of us. About the Author 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. 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).

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