Here’s another free excerpt from Public Parts, this one about the Germans and privacy. Here is the text (click on the link directly below or on the full-screen button in the app to read at a civilized size):
Posts about publicness
Public Parts: The introduction
Here, friends, is the introduction to my new book, Public Parts: How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves the Way we Work and Live, complete and free. It’s a summary of the thinking in the book.
The excerpt is in Scribd because that maintains the formatting and pretty typography. (Click on the full-screen button at the bottom of the player to blow it up, or click on the link atop to go to the Scribd page.)
Also, below, is the audio version of the intro — with me at the mic, oft-edited.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t tell you that you can go here for links to preorder the book, which is released on Sept. 27. And here is the schedule for the book tour, as it stands.
Public Parts by Jeff Jarvis – Read the Introduction
Here’s the audio excerpt. (If it’s not showing up, try this link; the embed has been a bit wonky for me.) By the way, audiobook fans, you can’t preorder the audio version — oddly — but it will be on sale promptly on Sept. 27.
Let me know what you think. I know you will…..
Fortune reviews Public Parts
Fortune’s Jessi Hempel writes a wonderful review of Public Parts, I’m proud to say.
“Privacy has its advocates. Jeff Jarvis has made himself an advocate for publicness. In Public Parts: How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves the Way we Work and Live, the original Internet optimist argues that if we become too obsessed with guarding all personal information on the ‘Net, we’ll miss important opportunities that come with making information available.
“It’s a refreshing take on a topic often covered by people who feel that the Internet — and in particular, social networks like Facebook and the vast amount of personal data that flow within them — threatens to imperil our children and undermine our society. . . . .
“His book is not so much a rallying cry for tweeting your breakfast choices and blogging your company financials as it is a field guide for how to navigate this new technology with optimism rather than fear.”
#fuckyouwashington
So I was angry. Watching TV news over dinner — turning my attention from scandals in the UK to those here and frankly welcoming the distraction from the tragedies in Norway — I listened to the latest from Washington about negotiations over the debt ceiling. It pissed me off. I’d had enough. After dinner, I tweeted: “Hey, Washington assholes, it’s our country, our economy, our money. Stop fucking with it.” It was the pinot talking (sounding more like a zinfandel).
That’s all I was going to say. I had no grand design on a revolution. I just wanted to get that off my chest. That’s what Twitter is for: offloading chests. Some people responded and retweeted, which pushed me to keep going, suggesting a chant: “FUCK YOU WASHINGTON.” Then the mellifluously monikered tweeter @boogerpussy suggested: “.@jeffjarvis Hashtag it: #FUCKYOUWASHINGTON.” Damn, I was ashamed I hadn’t done that. So I did.
And then it exploded as I never could have predicted. I egged it on for awhile, suggesting that our goal should be to make #fuckyouwashington a trending topic, though as some tweeters quickly pointed out, Twitter censors moderates topics. Soon enough, though, Trendistic showed us gaining in Twitter share and Trendsmap showed us trending in cities and then in the nation.
Jeff Howe tweeted: “Holy shit, @JeffJarvis has gone all Howard Beale on us. I love it. And I feel it. Give us our future back, fuckers. #FUCKYOUWASHINGTON.” He likes crowded things. He’s @crowdsourcing. He became my wingman, analyzing the phenom as it grew: “Why this is smart. Web=nuance. Terrible in politics. Twitter=loud and simple. Like a bumper sticker. #FuckYouWashington.” He vowed: “If this trends all weekend, you think it won’t make news? It will. And a statement. #FuckYouWashington.”
And then I got bumped off Twitter for tweeting too much. Who do the think they are, my phone company? Now I could only watch from afar. But that was appropriate, for I no longer owned this trend. As Howe tweeted in the night: “Still gaining velocity. Almost no tweets containing @crowdsourcing or @jeffjarvis anymore. It’s past the tipping point. #FuckYouWashington.”
Right. Some folks are coming into Twitter today trying to tell me how to manage this, how I should change the hashtag so there’s no cussin’ or to target their favorite bad man, or how I should organize marches instead. Whatever. #fuckyouwashington not mine anymore. That is the magic moment for a platform, when its users take it over and make it theirs, doing with it what the creator never imagined.
Now as I read the tweets — numbering in the tens of thousands by the next morning — I am astonished how people are using this Bealesque moment to open their windows and tell the world their reason for shouting #fuckyouwashington. It’s amazing reading. As @ericverlo declared, “The #fuckyouwashington party platform is literally writing itself.” True, they didn’t all agree with each other, but in their shouts, behind their anger, they betrayed their hopes and wishes for America.
@partygnome said: “#fuckyouwashington for valuing corporations more than people.”
@spsenski, on a major role, cried: “#fuckyouwashington for never challenging us to become more noble, but prodding us to become selfish and hateful…. #fuckyouwashington for not allowing me to marry the one I love…. #fuckyouwashington for driving me to tweet blue.”
@jellencollins: “#fuckyouwashington for making ‘debt’ a four letter word and ‘fuck’ an appropriate response.”
@tamadou: “#fuckyouwashington for giving yourselves special benefits and telling the American people they have to suck it up or they’re selfish.”
@psychnurseinwi: “#fuckyouwashington for having the compromising skills of a 3 year old.”
I was amazed and inspired. I was also trepidatious. I didn’t know what I’d started and didn’t want it to turn ugly. After all, we had just witnessed the ungodly horror of anger — and psychosis — unleashed in Norway. I’ve come to believe that our enemy today isn’t terrorism but fascism of any flavor, hiding behind anger as supposed cause.
But at moments such as this, I always need to remind myself of my essential faith in my fellow man — that is why I believe in democracy, free markets, education, journalism. It’s the extremists who fuck up the world and it is our mistake to manage our society and our lives to their worst, to the extreme. That, tragically, is how our political system and government are being managed today: to please the extremes. Or rather, that is why they are not managed today. And that is why I’m shouting, to remind Washington that its *job* is to *manage* the *business* of government.
The tweets that keep streaming in — hundreds an hour still — restore my faith not in government but in society, in us. Oh, yes, there are idiots, extremists, and angry conspiracy theorists and just plain jerks among them. But here, that noise was being drowned out by the voices of disappointed Americans — disappointed because they do indeed give a shit.
Their messages, their reasons for shouting #fuckyouwashington and holding our alleged leaders to higher expectations, sparks a glimmer of hope that perhaps we can recapture our public sphere. No, no, Twitter won’t do that here any more than it did it in Egypt and Libya. Shouting #fuckyouwashington is hardly a revolution. Believe me, I’m not overblowing the significance of this weekend’s entertainment. All I’m saying is that when I get to hear the true voice of the people — not the voice of government, not the voice of media, not a voice distilled to a number following a stupid question in a poll — I see cause for hope.
I didn’t intend this to be anything more than spouting off in 140 profane characters. It turns out that the people of Twitter taught me a lesson that I thought I was teaching myself in Public Parts, about the potential of a public armed with a Gutenberg press in every pocket, with its tools of publicness.
For an excellent summary of the saga as it unfolded on Twitter, see Maryann Batlle’s excellent compilation in Storify, as well as Gavin Sheridan’s Storyful. CBS News Online’s What’s Trending was the first in media to listen to what was happening here. David Weigel used this as a jumping off point for his own critique of Washington and the debt “crisis” at Slate. Says Michael Duff on his blog:
Everybody knows you guys are running the clock out, waiting for the next election. But you can’t have it both ways. You can’t go on TV to scare the shit out of us every day and then expect us to wait patiently for 2012.You can’t use words like “urgent” and “crisis” and then waste our time with Kabuki theater.
Either the situation is urgent and needs to be solved now, or it’s all just an act that can wait for 2012. This isn’t 1954, gentlemen. The voters are on to you now. We know you’re playing a game and we know you’re using us as chess pieces.
That’s why #fuckyouwashington is trending on Twitter. We’re tired of being pawns.
Every politician in Washington needs to pay attention to this outrage, and remember who they’re working for.
And then there’s this reaction from no less than Anonymous: “@jeffJarvis you’ve started a shit storm. Nice going.”
: MORE: Handelsblatt writes about the Twitter movement.
And a Washington Post blog chimes in.
Here’s TechPresident’s chimes in. “>report.
Discussions occurring with this post at CommentIsFree on the Guardian and HuffingtonPost.
Süddeutsche Zeitung on #fuckdichwashington.
: The next day: ABCNews.com covers the tag — and finds a safe way to illustrate the story.
Here’s The Wrap wrapping it up.
And the story has been covered in France, where #fuckyouwashington sounds, well, elegant and sexy:
Here’s the CBS Early Show report on the tag:
More CBS: It’s online show What’s Trending also reported on the event. Stupidly, they disable embedding of videos. That won’t help them trend, will it? But here’s an old-fashioned link.
Here’s NBC’s wimp-out presentation of #fuckyouwashington.
KABC local TV report here.
: A week later: The hashtag passes 100k tweets and Howie Kurtz and I talk about it on Reliable Sources:
A true threat to privacy
Among the most deliberate and abhorrent mass violations of privacy committed in recent memory did not come as a result of technology, social services, databases, hackers, thieves, leakers, or governments. It was an act of a news organization, News Corp., which hacked into the phones of a reported 4,000 people, including not just celebrities but dead children and the families of the victims of terrorism and war.
Power corrupts.
The oh-so-rich irony is that this comes from the same company that, through its Wall Street Journal, fancies itself the protector of our privacy. The Journal would have us believe that web sites, technology companies, advertisers, and retailers are the enemies of privacy. No, it was their own corporate colleagues, their fellow journalists.
The solution to this threat to privacy is not to change technology or even the law. It is to enforce the laws, norms, and mores that already exist and hold to account the criminals and those responsible for their actions. That is, the managers of News Corp. That is, the Murdoch family.
This is not a matter of technology but of corruption.
Killing the offending News of the World is — I agree with the Guardian — a deeply cynical act. Some relatively small number of the paper’s employees was responsible for these acts — they’re presumed to be gone already. Now all of them are out of a job. Now a 168-year-old newspaper is dead — and it’s not as if we have any to spare. But the bosses responsible for the coverup remain.
The Murdochs apparently believe that they have amputated the offending limb and that’s that. But the toxin still flows in the bloodstream.
Mind you, I’m not your stock Murdoch basher. I worked for News Corp. in the ’90s, when I was TV critic at TV Guide, when the company owned it. I launched a magazine there and then went to work briefly at Delphi Internet when the company bought it (escaping in the nick of time before the first of many News Corp. internet disasters ensued). When News Corp. bought Dow Jones, I told reporters that I had not seen interference from Murdoch the way I had at revered Time Inc. That is to say, I defended Murdoch.
A further disclosure: My next book, Public Parts, was to be published, like my last one, by News Corp.’s HarperCollins. But I pulled the book because in it, I am very critical of the parent company for being so closed. It’s now being published by Simon and Schuster.
One more disclosure: I write for and have consulted for the Guardian, which has dogged this story brilliantly and triumphally.
Now having said all that, I’ll say this: News Corp. and its culture are simply corrupt. I’ll ask you this: Could you imagine such crimes occurring at Google? Wouldn’t these crimes mortally damage its brand? Could you imagine News Corp. taking Google’s pledge to do no evil? Those are rhetorical questions. The answers are obvious.
I’m most appalled that News Corp.’s crimes occur under the banner of journalism. Ah, professional journalism, which holds itself up above the supposedly nonexistent standards of bloggers and mere citizens and witnesses. Journalism, here to protect, educate, inform, and represent us.
I doubt we’ll end up with a Nixonian moment: What did Rupert know and when did he know it? But we can’t say the same for his son, James. See the Guardian’s annotation of James’ statement today (a new form of journalism, by the way), which only raises more questions. He is in charge of News International, the offending division. He is set to take over the company. The company is almost set to take over Sky.
I’m generally a critic of regulating speech and thus media. But the UK regulates media and I can’t imagine a better time to do so. What will the government do? If it allows the Sky acquisition to go through, then it makes a lie and laugh of its authority. Meanwhile, what can the profession do to amputate this diseased arm, News Corp.?
I know I sound strident here. I know some will properly accuse me of being late to the bonfire, having just confessed that I’d defended Murdoch. But the two go together. I was willing to give the Murdochs their rope. Now they’ve hung themselves with it.
The story’s a long way away from America. But News Corp. isn’t. Now all of us who live under its influence deserve to ask what they will do to fix the company’s corrupt culture that allowed these crimes. We can ask. But I don’t expect answers.
Social is for sharing, not hiding
I fear we are on the verge of fetishizing privacy. Well, we’re not — but our media and government are.
Media’s assumptions
Yesterday I got a call from a journalist about Google+ and its Circles. He was not at all hostile to Google, Facebook, or social, but even so, implicit in his questions was a presumption that privacy is our highest priority in social services.
Think about that for half a minute and the absurdity of it becomes apparent. We don’t come to social services to hide secrets; that would be idiotic. We come to share.
The journalist said that people must be afraid of being public. Think about that for the rest of a minute: Media and government have held a monopoly on publicness as they have owned the megaphone and soapbox. Now the internet gives the rest of us the ability to be public and these long-public people think we are scared of what the have? How patronizing of them.
The meme about Google+ Circles is that it beats Facebook on privacy because it gives us upfront control over whom we share with. That’s true: Every time I share something I make a decision about whether to share it with the public or some of my circles. That is better, clearer, and easier than digging into Facebook’s settings once and for all to silo my world. It is better than not bothering to change those settings and depending on Facebook’s defaults, only to find them change and become more public. Google+ got to learn from Facebook and start with Circles to enable this difference.
Except I have watched my own behavior with Google+ lo, these 36 hours and I find at when I share with less than everyone it is not out of privacy or security needs. It’s out of relevance. I may have something to tell my TWiT colleagues or my fellow journowonks that would bore everyone else who follows me. So I restrict my audience not to keep a secret but to reduce noise for them, which I can’t do on Twitter or can’t easily do on Facebook. I am still sharing; it’s better sharing.
The journalist talked about Zuckerberg and Google wanting us to share — and they do because, as I’ve said, they depend on getting us to generate more signals about our interests, needs, and desires so they can gi e us more relevant, thus valuable content, services, and advertising. But in the journalist’s phrasing I heard him implying that Zuckerberg and Page were squeezing stuff out of like toothpaste tubes, against our wills.
Nonsense. As I say in Public Parts, 600 million people can’t be wrong. We are sharing a billion things a day on Facebook alone because we want to, because we find value in it. That’s where the discussion should begin, with the power of publicness, not with the presumption of privacy.
Government’s presumptions
I was delighted yesterday to see a senator — Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania — warn his colleagues against “breaking the internet.”
Some are in such a rush to regulate the net and protect what they and media think is our highest priority — privacy — that they threaten to both hamper how sites and services and operate and how they can sustain themselves.
Jay Rockefeller is pushing do-not-track. John Kerry and John McCain have a privacy bill. Al Franken has a bill to limit sharing of location data with third parties (those “third parties” are becoming the boogeymen of the digital age, though they are often just companies that serve ads, provide web services such as analytics, and sell us stuff).
I’m not suggesting that all this legislation is bad. We do need privacy protections. Sites must give us greater and clearer control over what we share to whom and why (as Google seems to have done with its Circles). Phones should not be storing information about what we do without our knowledge and without giving us control over it. Stipulated.
But I fear unintended consequences. Rockefeller’s do-not-track could pull the advertising rug out from under web sites, forcing some of them to go behind a pay wall — if they can — and killing other sites, reducing the content on the web. Franken’s location bill, I learned this week, does not have a carve out for sending data to ad-servers (they are dreaded “third parties”), which could kneecap the local-mobile content industry before it even starts.
Politicians and media companies are coming at these questions at the wrong starting line: as if we go to the internet to take a piece of private information and squirrel it away there. That’s not what we’re doing. We’re sharing.
: MORE: On Twitter, @hasanahmad complains that when sharing a photo with a circle members of that circle could share it in turn and then it becomes more public.
Yes, absolutely. That’s how life works. You tell a friend something. Then, as I say in Public Parts, the responsibility for what to do with that lies with that friend; what you’ve said is public to that extent and whether it becomes more public is a decision your friend will now make. It may be fine to share in turn; it may not be. You’d need to set those conditions with that friend before sharing. And if you don’t want the friend to share, maybe you shouldn’t share. The issue here isn’t technology. It’s people. No change there.
So I asked my Twitter interrogator what he proposes we do about this: Put license conditions on the photo we share? Sue the friend?
This is where Eric Schmidt is right. I’ll paraphrase him: If you want to hide something, the worst place to do that is on a social network. That’s where you share. Your brain is where you hide secrets.
: SEE ALSO: Jonathan Allen on sharing for purpose v privacy.
On the Media on the e-G8
Here’s audio of my interview with Brooke Gladstone of On the Media about the e-G8:
Transcript here.
I was wrong
I just want to get this on the record and off my (fully clothed) chest: I was wrong about Anthony Weiner.
I’d said nothing about the whole hoo-ha because I didn’t think it was worth the attention. Then I got a call from Howard Kurtz’ Reliable Sources to come on last Sunday and talk about it. My wife said, Why are you doing that? I said, I’ll be on the right side. As always, she was right. On the show, I said that media were using this as an opportunity for sophomoric jokes and that the fuss over a penis was a symptom of American Puritanism. What’s the worst that happened here? I asked: So what if he had a stupid picture on his phone and accidentally tweeted it, so long as he wasn’t sexually harassing anyone? But that’s not the worst that happened.
Weiner lied. That is the story. That’s what haters said in email to me after the CNN segment. They were right.
What’s most amazing to me is that anyone in politics in this age could still be stupid enough to think that the coverup won’t be what kills them. That’s not just a matter of the age of publicness and the net that I write about. It is perhaps Richard Nixon’s most important legacy. I gave Weiner too much credit when I thought he must have figured this out.
The personal irony for me is that I’ve long thought Weiner is a weasel. I chose to overlook that in this case. Wrong again. I confronted him at a Personal Democracy Forum a few years ago (it so happens that PDF11 is going on right now) over his support of noxious legislation to raise fines on so-called indecency on broadcast. Weiner would go onto Howard Stern’s show as an alleged fan to get the attention but then he’d turn around and throw Stern, the First Amendment, and freedom of speech to the wind for a politically expedient vote. So he voted with prudery and isn’t it always the case that the prudes are the ones with something to hide? Now we see what he was hiding.
I’m trying to pull back from my personal embarrassment and stupidity at giving this shmuck the benefit of the doubt and see the lessons here about our age of publicness. There are many. It fascinates me that Twitter provides such an easy way for people to connect for *any* purpose. It astounds me that Weiner thought he could do this under his name with his face and think it would not end up being a public act. Once he was public to the extent of sharing with one person — a stranger — then it’s nothing for that to be shared with the world in an instant. All this affirms my belief that the only sane way to operate in one’s life today — as a public figure especially — is as if *anything* you do can and will be seen by *anyone.* I would still like to think that eventually this will lead to an assumption, a default of transparency.
But then, I keep forgetting the calculate into this view the forgetful, venal stupidity of the public official. That’s where I was wrong. Have I said that enough?
: I emailed a link to this post to the people who emailed me after the CNN segment. They were nasty in how they said it but they were right.
