I have it on good authority that despite what the website says, Camgirls is finally in stock at Amazon. So go buy a copy, if you've been putting it off.

Tags: activism, gender, internet, politics, pop culture, work

No work is more fun for me than editing, and I've never had more fun editing than I did last December when I worked on Terri Senft's Camgirls: Celebrity and Community in the Age of Social Networks.

Camgirls is a book about women who live their lives in public on the web, and it concentrates on webcams in their heyday, but that's really just its hook. It's a book about how celebrity and community operate online. It's a book about LiveJournal. (Terri has been participating in and observing LiveJournal culture as tsenft for eight years, and she's got a huge amount of smart stuff to say about how LJ operates as a tool for building connections between people.) It's a book about feminism, about sex work, and about how gender is lived on the internet. It's a book, fundamentally, about the construction and presentation of the self in the online era --- about how we establish and maintain ourselves as people and as personae when we live our lives online.

It's a hell of a book. Really. I bought two copies, so that I can lend one out and not worry about getting it back. Go get yourself one. If you do, and you regret it, mail it to me. I'll pay you for it, reimburse you the shipping, and find it a good home.


Update: Forgot to mention --- If any of you are interested in reviewing Camgirls, or if you or anyone you know is teaching a course in cyberculture or women's studies for which you might be interested in assigning it, let me know. I'll get Terri to hook you up with a PDF reader's copy.

Further Update: So it appears that Camgirls is not yet quite available. Consider this a pre-publication endorsement, and I'll post again when the book is actually on offer. I'm still happy to make arrangements to get PDFs out, though.

Tags: activism, gender, internet, politics, pop culture, work

Here's another snippet of that Clay Shirky talk I posted about the other day:

I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment. Maybe she's going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn't what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, "What you doing?" And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, "Looking for the mouse."

Here's something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here's something four-year-olds know: Media that's targeted at you but doesn't include you may not be worth sitting still for. Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change. Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won't have to go through the trauma that I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan's Island, they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing.

It's also become my motto, when people ask me what we're doing--and when I say "we" I mean the larger society trying to figure out how to deploy this cognitive surplus, but I also mean we, especially, the people in this room, the people who are working hammer and tongs at figuring out the next good idea. From now on, that's what I'm going to tell them: We're looking for the mouse.

That's a chunk of what I've been doing with this blog (and the new blog) recently --- looking for the mouse.

Oh, and courtesy of bugsybanana, here's a link to the whole talk on video. Thanks, Bugs!

Tags: internet