seojealous

with all the traveling i’ve done recently, i’ve had the luxury of extra reading time - i try to finish a book every time i’m in the air. in the past week, i completed two interesting reads. the first was deep economy: the wealth of communities and the durable future by bill mckibben. due in part to slim pickin’s at the airport bookstore, the second was the unavoidable #1 bestseller the assault on reason by al gore (yeah, yeah - stay with me). what i found really interesting was the point where these books intersect for a moment in a discussion of the internet’s unprecedented capacity to inform and mobilize communities. 

first, a 10 second summary of each. in deep economy, mckibben deals with a range of topics including local food and energy production, entreprenuership in china, and citizen-run radio stations. the book centers around one primary question: can society reach the point where having more no longer makes things better? and as you may imagine, gore’s book discusses the current administration’s policies, climate change, and participatory democracy. 

their shared ground points to the internet as a still-unfettered destination for public participation. mckibben writes: “despite every effort to turn it into one more television set[…], the internet continues to operate more like - to use my favorite metaphor - a farmers market where a million people bring their produce to sell.” this shared medium differs widely from tv in its collaborative nature. a user on the web engages in all sorts of active behaviors: searching, scanning, reading, watching video, and always making conscious choices about what to consume.

not so with television. sure, by turning on the set, the tv viewer consents to accept its content. but the viewer is not active; instead he or she is acted upon and advertised to without the ability to participate in the conversation.

from gore’s perspective, ”the easy accessibility individuals have to publish ideas on the internet has led to the emergence of a new meritocracy of ideas that is similar in some ways to the public forum that existed during the time of america’s founding.” and that’s powerful stuff. it’s easy to forget that we work every day in a medium that has completely changed the way people share and consume information, introducing a new wave of public discourse. and much of the work we do has made the space better; when people look for news, or information, or that product-they-just-gotta-have, they can easily find it.

i’m off to miami in a couple weeks. maybe next time i’ll just read some fiction?