Books

we-the-media

Book review: Dan Gillmor’s We, the Media

When I attended journalism school at Rutgers, the underlying premise of every class, every lesson, was that we were the expert professionals whose job it is to gather and filter the news for readers. It’s time to toss those textbooks onto the bonfire of the vanities, for little did we see the rise of citizens media, a grassroots-powered phenomenon in which users are becoming both competitors and collaborators with established news organizations. It is this media revolution-in-the-making that Dan Gillmor skillfully chronicles in his new book, We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People (O’Reilly Media). This is certainly the most important journalism book of this year, for it aptly details a gathering storm that is about

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free culture

Book review: Lawrence Lessig’s ‘Free Culture’

When future generations look back at this unsettled era in which we’re transitioning from an analog to a digital society, the search bots may be impressed most by the works of Lawrence Lessig. In his first book, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, dark forces were gathering, conspiring to use code as a form of privatized law to hem in the Internet and the potential of the digital revolution. Readers learned that the Net, far from impervious, could be subdued by rewiring its architecture. The premise seems obvious now, but only because Lessig’s 1999 ground-breaker connected the dots for us and set the scene for the struggles to follow. His 2001 follow-up, The Future of Ideas, examined the kinds of

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