As the author of popular BuzzMachine blog and the 2009 hit What Would Google Do, CUNY Assistant Professor Jeff Jarvis has established himself as one of the liveliest and most incorrigibly optimistic new media pundits.
If anything, Jarvis’ incorrigible optimism has grown since his book about Google.
Having lived through a prostate cancer scare, which he blogged about in intimate detail, he is now writing a new book a defense of publicness, entitled Public Parts which will be published next year. As Jarvis told me when we talked about the past, the present and the future of media last week, Public Parts will argue that our current obsession with defending privacy is counterproductive, both to us as individuals and as a society.
While I’m more than a little ambivalent about Jarvis’ publicness fetish (full disclosure: I’m currently writing my own book in defense of privacy), I find his optimism about the future of media and journalism very refreshing. In contrast with groups like Free Press who have lost faith in the ability of the free market to reinvent media, Jarvis – who is also the Director of the Interactive Program at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism– believes that it would be most unwise to allow government to get into the “business” of subsidizing journalism. Here, I think, he is entirely correct. And as our conversation reveals, few people are doing more than Jeff Jarvis to both invent a viable future for journalism and to nurture a new generation of innovative media entrepreneurs.
Jarvis on Publicness: Why the public is as importance as the private and on why he’s having a ball writing a book about his penis.
Jarvis on WikiLeaks: On openness and the new culture of transparency in politics and media.
Jarvis on the Future of Journalism: Why the government shouldn’t subsidize journalism and how the future of journalism is entrepreneurial.
Jarvis on Google: Why even Google is struggling to be Google.
Jarvis on the end of text: Why were are living in a post-Guttenberg world and passing from a text based to an interactive civilization.