Share or Die is a new anthology from Shareable.net (whose mandate is to promote sharing in all its guises), written by 20-somethings struggling through austerity and econopocalypse, who find in sharing a solution to some of their problems. I was privileged to write the book’s foreword, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. You can buy a copy or get a PDF for free — all the book’s publishers ask is that you tweet the fact that you’ve gotten a copy yourself. Here’s a snip of my foreword:
This was supposed to be the disconnected generation. Raised on video-games and networked communications, kept indoors by their parents’ fear of predators and the erosion of public transit and public spaces, these were the kids who were supposed to be socially isolated, preferring the company of video-game sprites to their peers, preferring Facebook updates to real-life conversations.
The Internet’s reputation for isolation is undeserved and one-dimensional. If the net makes it possible to choose to interact through an electronic remove from “the real world,” it *also* affords the possibility of inhabiting the “real world” even when you’ve been shut away from it by your fearful parents or the tyranny of suburban geography.
Even as entertainment moguls were self-servingly declaring “content is king,” they failed to notice that content without an audience was about as interesting as a tree that falls in the deserted woods. Conversation is king, not content. If we gather around forums to talk about TV shows or movies or games or bands, it’s because we enjoy talking with each other, because “social” is the best content there is. Content is just something to talk about. That’s why telcoms — the industry that charges you to connect with other breathing humans — is 100 times larger than entertainment.
Which is to say that our “disconnected” generation is more connected than any generation in history — connected via a huge, technologically augmented peripheral nervous system of communications technologies that gives them continuous, low-level insight into their peers and the world they inhabit. Which is not to say that being wired up to the net’s social radar is an unadulterated good: adding capacity and velocity to your nervous system can be a recipe for disaster, creating race-conditions in which minor disagreements snowball into vicious fights, where the bad as well as the good can find itself magnified through positive feedback loops that ratchet minor stimuli into feedback screams.
Download a Complete Copy of Share or Die