“Public Parts….

I was reading review of the book “Public Parts: How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves the Way We Work and Live” discussed by the author Jeff Jarvis Blogger, journalist at Berkman Luncheon discussion series. The discussion and the content of the book seemed to be relevant for the present circumstances when the Government is imposing pre-censorship on the internet. The book discusses how internet brings people closer and how internet is behind the revolutions seeking democratic reforms in countries like Egypt and other African nations. His book defends the openness of the Internet and discusses ways in which the Internet has made modern life public. He has argued against regulations to protect privacy. Here are the excerpts from the discussion-
Thanks to the internet, we now live—more and more—in public. More than 750 million people (and half of all Americans) use Facebook, where we share a billion times a day. The collective voice of Twitter echoes instantly 100 million times daily, from
Tahrir Square to the Mall of America, on subjects that range from democratic reform to unfolding natural disasters to celebrity gossip.
Yet change brings fear, and many people—nostalgic for a more homogeneous mass culture and provoked by well-meaning advocates for privacy—despair that the internet and how we share there is making us dumber, crasser, distracted, and vulnerable to threats of all kinds. But not Jeff Jarvis.
In this shibboleth-destroying book, Public Parts argues persuasively and personally that the internet and our new sense of publicness are, in fact, doing the opposite. Jarvis travels back in time to show the amazing parallels of fear and resistance that met the advent of other innovations such as the camera and the printing press. The internet, he argues, will change business, society, and life as profoundly as Gutenberg’s invention, shifting power from old institutions to us all.

In India through regulation and censorship the state is undermining the freedom of speech and expression. In future the state will scrutinize or oppose any reform which is supported by the internet in the name of privacy.