Publisher's Synopsis
In Public Parts, Jeff Jarvis travels through history to show the amazing parallels of distrust and fear that met the advent of innovations such as the printing press and the camera. He reveals amazing, almost unnerving, connections between our suspicions and discomforts through history as technology has inexorably changed the world and our sense of us within it.
Based on extensive interviews, Jarvis introduces us to the men and women building the Internet today. Some of them have become household names-Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter's Ev Williams- many more of them may soon be recognized as the industrialists, philosophers, and designers of our online future. He reveals the promising ways in which the Internet is already allowing us to collaborate, organize and create in dazzling ways-how we manufacture and merchandise, buy and sell, teach and learn. It is a world being built on an ethic of transparency and generosity but as Jarvis shows, it is a world that's already impacting economies, industries, human health, and many other facets of humanity in meaningful and measurable ways. Jarvis makes an urgent case that the future of the internet-needs as much protection as the physical space we share. It is a space of the public, for the public and by the public-and it needs respect and protection from all of us, no matter how we use it.
