There are benefits to publicness and they are worth fighting for
By Alexandra Reid
Jeff Jarvis, a widely respected influencer in the media space, spoke at Third Tuesday Ottawa last week about his new book, Public Parts: How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves the Way We Work and Live, the benefits of what he calls “publicness” and why it deserves just as much attention as privacy.
As a self-proclaimed “publicness advocate,” Jarvis says that “in our current privacy mania we are not talking enough about the value of publicness. If we default to private, we risk losing the value of the connections the Internet brings: meeting people, collaborating with them, gathering the wisdom of our crowd, and holding the powerful to public account.” Jarvis believes we have a “right and need to protect our privacy” – to control our information and identities – but also that the conversation and our decisions should include consideration of the value of sharing and linking. Jarvis’s intention is to work towards the protection of what’s public as a public good, and that includes the Internet.
