I think these business oriented writers tend to lead the discourse because, as of now, most of those involved in buying these books or reading these articles are interested in practical advice on how they can best manipulate the internet to their own purposes, not analyze it. Most do not want to talk about the power structure. You will not hear many discussions online about a 1% vs. a 99% online, because so many dream of wanting to BE the 1% online in order to have the most influence.

The idea that only academics are rigorous is a nonsense. The University has great virtues (I make my living in one) but it is often accused of not being empirical or realistic itself.
Evgeny wrote a great book but one serious criticism of it I have heard (from academics) is that it lacked a convincing theory of either media or power. So I think his uncharacteristically spiteful review of Jarvis' book was a tad arrogant from someone whose great work was immediately challenged (though by no means nullified) by events. We don't have enough public intellectuals of any kind and the kind of bile that both Evgeny and Jeff indulged in doesn't really encourage more to emerge.

Nathan,
Well, Sesame Street allusions notwithstanding, you hit on a divide that does, indeed, need some attention.
I did *not* set out to write an academic book (footnotes aside). My goal is to get publicness -- and protecting its tools -- discussed in the same breath as privacy. I want that discussion to occur in many circles: policy, politics, business, technology, and among net citizens. So I wanted to write a -- for lack of a better word -- popular book.
Thus I would not enter into a treatise on Habermas; I refer to him to set the terms of the debate on the notions of the public sphere, for example.
Now that may disappoint or irritate academics who wish me to have written another book. But that's not the book I wanted to write. And, as you say, it's up to those who are capable of writing such books to do so. The more the better -- the more perspectives, the more books, the more discussion.
But the risk you meet is the academy being exclusive -- excluding all the people you list above. Why? I see it as additive. We write our books. You write yours. We learn from each other. We enter into conversations. That's the ethic of open exchange I learn not only on the web ... but also in universities.
So I welcome those perspectives as I hope that people writing academic books would.
By the way, since some asked me to, I wrote a fuller response to Morozov here: http://bit.ly/rjQRnF

Oh, and yes, I'd be eager to have that other conversation as well. I tried to survey many topics surrounding the issues so I will agree that there are areas that deserve more conversation.

I'd have to disagree that academic works are by definition or even de facto more rigorous or closer to the truth than popular works à la Jarvis.

While sociology and psychology are empirical sciences, the closer you get to theoretical sociology and communication studies, the more philosophical these investigations become and thus the more dependent on the persuasiveness of the argumentation and, let's be honest, on being able to string together a bunch of pithy quotes by important precursors that through a process akin to magic end up supporting your argument. I have a master's in philosophy and plenty of buddies with doctorates, so I know full well how this works and how dishonest some academics are in this regard — whether the intellectual fraud is pursued wittingly or not, I don't know.

In my own field of expertise, epistemology, it was at times plain dazzling to see how childish philosophers can act when confronted with their opponents' arguments, with how much nonchalance opposing views get brushed off. Or how simplistic some of the proposed theories and arguments were in the first place. A PhD does not a scholar make.

(As an aside, the slightly immature running joke among my fellow philosophy students was always that critical theory and communication studies was just crappy philosophy, and that we felt sorry for people in those fields, heh.)

There is amazingly great work going on in academe (though not all of it as well-written as it could be), but for every good paper there are ten bullshit ones. Which is about the same ratio that you can expect to see in the literature "business folks" write. Yet the message you seem to convey is one of blanket rejection — maybe at most this stuff is "enjoyable", but it's not written by someone in my professional sphere, so it can't be any good. Is that really what you're saying? Is that opinion based on broad and substantive evidence, viz. have you read a lot of these books, and have you tried to read them without too many preconceptions, without begrudging the non-professionals for entering your territory even before you start to read?

Come to grips with the fact that universities are not the only place where wisdom originates nowadays, and take responsibility for academia's utter failure in disseminating its findings and theories. Solve that problem before you complain about jaded publishers, a public that does not listen and before you start calling anyone an anti-intellectual.

(And, yes, you hit a nerve here.)

As an academic, I applaud this piece not as a lambasting of business writing, but as a slam against the laziness of academics. We often are not on the cutting edge of trends, tech, or social developments (even if that is what our own departments are about (I come from a cultural studies/media background, for example...)). We often only write books when we are bothered into it. I've constantly challenged myself to stay current in order to study the "now" rather than try to make something that happened 5 years ago relevant.

But, as I am between degrees/programs at the moment, and work for a social media business....they are all about this stuff. And it is mostly pretty base level.

But, I think most of the social media/tech academics are roughly my age (27), since we grew up as the internet developed. We will be developing the academic canon of this stuff over the next few years. Instead of waiting for academics to weigh in on this stuff, consider waiting for the social-media/tech-infused academic to start getting their degrees.

There are different levels of discussions in this debate:
FIRST, what is the role of academics? In Europe, and especially on the Continent, that is outside of the Anglo-Saxon sphere, academics, especially when they are philosophers or historians, have a public role. You see them often on television and in magazines. When they reach this stage of quasi fame, they are branded "intellectuals" because they heavily participate in the collective debate about our society. Interestingly, intellectuals can also be non-academics.
In this context, both Jeff Jarvis and Evgeny Morozov are intellectuals who happen to disagree in a vociferous way. This acrimonious exchange of views, in my view, has a positive contribution to the society because it gets personal, real, emotional, and thus is more likely to be read and discussed by millions of amateurs. In other words, the debate looks more like a Latin opinion fight rather than an anglo-saxon debate about empirical evidences!
SECOND, it is true that academics tend to be slow, too cautious and, above all, lack creativity – this is obviously on the verge of stereotypes, but there is some veracity in it. We need them to be precise and Cartesian, but from time to time a bit of lateral thinking is welcome - think about the discovery of the DNA double helix, Michael Porter's market forces or Jared Diamond’s multi-century grand summaries. So I get Jeff Jarvis’ point on non-academics sense of celerity and “go-to-market” strategy, even if it involves some approximation, which should be welcome since haste is often an integral part of the thoughts.
THIRD, inversely, experts in digital media tend to remain in a state of permanent beatitude towards technological innovations – we call this phenomenon techno-beatitude. This naivety, even if genuine and driven by optimistic beliefs, is often used by businesses, with or without the help of digital intellectual, to push their corporate agenda for less constraints on digital platforms… which in some cases can be detrimental to consumers and citizens. This lack of distance from the day-to-day life on the Net is worrying, and perhaps this is what Evgeny Morozov is trying to address.
LAST, I haven’t read Jeff Jarvis new book on privacy in a digital age. He argued in a piece he posted today that his book does address the danger of a lack of privacy. On the contrary, Evgeny Morozov seems to think, in his critic published by The New Republic, that Jeff’s book is one-sided. I am going to read the book in question and make up my mind – but I may not have bought it had Morozov and Jarvis had not had a public spat! Thanks for that.

But isn't anti-intellectualism a favorite hobby of the academy? I would argue that precisely because he's writing a simplistic book lacking in rigor, Jeff Jarvis is acting in accordance with the academic expectations for a public intellectual. Morozov is in fact out-of-step with how things work (in a positive sense), which is elite scholarly rigor in obscure journals, but submission to the pseudo-democracy of the media and the market in the popular press.

This attitude seems to be primarily a disease of the humanities. Stanford recently offered its "Introduction to Artificial Intelligence" class, taught by some of the leading researchers in the field, for free over the internet. It's clear that they believe the public is capable of learning sophisticated ideas and engaging deeply with subject matter, and with 130,000 enrolled students, the public agrees. I think the success of open courseware is a rebuke to this common wisdom that the public is anti-intellectual. CEOs and senior managers may not be anti-intellectual themselves, but they read anti-intellectual books because they are useful for dominating debates in a media environment that privileges sound bytes and quick comebacks.

Humanities scholars are much slower to get on the internet, and in my experience, even when they do have an active blog, often view responding to comments from non-academics as a waste of their time. (Note: I am not making any kind of oblique point about this blog.)

In fairness, it probably is a waste of their time. It's difficult to see how correcting the misunderstandings of random strangers on the internet helps them in their career. It also makes sense to me that humanities scholars who have largely abandoned the public good of promoting public understanding would come to see their work primarily in instrumental terms.

To put it in a media-friendly metaphor, academics have decided the problem with the ivory tower is that it is made of ivory, not that it is a tower. They preserve the exclusiveness and claim the knowledge is worthless, even while they earn their living producing it. In a parallel to the cynical attitude of the CEOs who don't believe what they read but repeat it anyway, today's academics accept a paycheck for producing knowledge that they believe has no value or relevance outside of academia.

Nathan,
Good conversation starter (as usual). I've posted a long response at my blog MeMyselfandHim.com here.

IT IS SPEED.. IT IS the media of the machine.... the cash register and the video screen.

sesame street was the "perfect" name to drop... its a perfect example of how Mcluhans ideas where USED to teach the previous medium, but ignored the true affects of its current medium....TV. Kidsacan all FEEL BERT AND Ernys life choice angst... but they cant name the Vice President --unless its in a video cartoon song meme... as to law--- well.. theres only a bill... cosby or shatner for them;0

and here we are again.... and actually its been 20 years of us silent, not heard "creatives" not "thinking like Jobs" and "a new tool to not master" every 2 years...

glad a few finally have gotten to the real picture... kinda like the iphone carrying nike clad kids on wall street.;)

and this isnt about acadamia.. less face it. their always 20 years late to the game;)...but it IS about responsible thinking and experimentation on the world grad lab.. now called the web-er appsTM... and supposedly to be linked into each of our brains or hearts(already there with tech religious gurus on the lecture circuit of the nanosecond) by the next decade.

two general points:

1-academics are often "late to the game", yes. however, academics tend to be much earlier in bringing up points that are not clearly marketable or practical, such as asking "who benefits?" what about power? what about subordinate groups? academics are usually early to these important and often neglected conversations.

2-an update to my McLuhan comment. see this video where he was brought onto TV to opine on the role of television in a 1976 Ford/Carter presidential debate. he is allowed to theorize. he makes important points about how the medium of television and the focus on an image was most important and the content of their speech was largely staged and irrelevant. these are points still true today in "debates" in the United States when we watch candidates talk past each other with scripted points rather than actually debate.

can we imagine, say, CNN bringing on, and actually listening to, a social media theorist for the 2012 elections?

I found Jeff's book interesting and thought provoking. That's why I read books (and blogs) these days- not to have my own ideas confirmed. I don't agree with some of what Jeff is suggesting but the book opened my mind to a way of thinking.
It seems to me that some of the criticism of the book is suggesting that he or someone should have written a more scholarly treatment of the subject. Maybe, but a useful review judges a book against what it is trying to do, not against something else.
Morozov's book (and his review) seem to me to be part of an internet-skeptic tradition probably began by Clifford Stoll http://amzn.to/oqwiFq. Perhaps useful, because there is much exaggeration of the power of the internet but in the end not, for me, very thought provoking.

if im not mistaken.. Mcluhan was "brought" to fame BY Ad men (Chiat?) in the US who desired to use his "ideas" to help them "sell" their services...

and today we ARE overloaded with "media pundits" at each debate... they are now part of the problem, as they only debate the style and surface of the debate, thus MAKE debates geared to only style and one liners.. since the debaters KNOW they will ONLY get MORE air time...IF they have the best zinger or make the worst blunder(not their hope one would assume)

the main irony is that Mcluhan was about suggesting ideas...and their evidence... unlike many pundist today wwere talking about in the "metanet circus" he DIDNT actually desire the affects of what he witnessed.. he wasnt SELLING media-cracy..:)-- he spoke about not liking the future he saw ...

Clifford Stoll was kinda too manic- both pro and against TECH to be much of a "thought leader" but he was a "feeling leader" and that of course is what most of the pundits are selling anyway... PRO TECH "feelings" until they (if they get older like lanier) get more experience/age and "think" differently..

marketing. creative/ not in college folk( or those who suckle at publishers teets) DO bring up such questions.. btw- they do ask about power and why.. they only use their answers...;) Transmedia was well into being way before Jenkins, and i can assure you -thanks to those like Lanier,(when he was a protech hippie dippie vr hippie) that VR was IN business with all questions asked 20 years before "academics" flooded Second Life edu.;)

but i suggest just like jarvis' "google/facebook public" hawking...the results of such "paid punditry" of such "double sided" mediuma in 20 years will results in just another "book" one that may say then "we are not a public ultility";)

and when did academic equal intelligent?;) and when did intelligence equal wisdom... tech convergence dosnet work for such things...

Regarding "but instead providing sound-bites aimed squarely at the business community." - that's where *the money is*. See this great post:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/10/meme-weaver/8625/

Meme Weaver
The author tries—and fails—to cash in on a big idea.
By Marshall Poe

"Even more important was my realization that I had no inner James Surowiecki, Malcolm Gladwell, or Chris Anderson. From my editor’s perspective, these were models, and rightly so. They made trade publishers a fortune. From my perspective, however, they were good writers who had spun big ideas into gold. I couldn’t write a big-idea book, because, as it turned out, I didn’t believe in big ideas. By my lights, they almost had to be wrong."

No, I don't think McLuhan was brought to face by the ad agencies tho they might have tried to exploit his ideas.
I read Medium not long after it was published and was mightily impressed. I thought this was a big idea. I re read it some years later and decided it was a mixture of platitudes and sophistry but still thought provoking.
Stoll now looks very strange. The idea that the internet has nothing of value to ordinary folk and is best left to the professionals is now laughable. But at the time it was at least plausible.
Jarvis's book might seem equally foolish in ten years time. Meanwhile, what I like about it is that it encourages thought on how the internet - in particular social media - will affect our ideas of public/private. A very worthwhile thing to think about, even if you come to different conclusions to Jarvis.
To me, the fascinating thing is that no one has a good track record of forecasting the internet and its implications. Remember how Bill Gates initially dismissed it and then tried to build his own?
Forecasting the technology is not difficult. What is just about impossible is forecasting how people will use it and what applications will appeal to them.
One of my favourite examples is texting on mobile phones - really invented by users. The makers and carriers had no idea that its use would explode among young people as it did.
Coming back to Jarvis, I think he is as plausible as anyone and his book is certainly worth reading by anyone interested in all this stuff.
By the way, I still think the Long Tail is a very big idea with huge implications.

pretty sure youre wrong about "how mcluhan" became "Mcluhan"...
and 20 years ago the predictions we had for the thunk generation has been proven pretty dead on. as every satire became a vc plan like "facebook"..for exmaple- the plug - hosted by andy warhols dead corpse( 1992) and it certainly tags "the social network" thinking of today.. as the publicity thinking of jarvis -- though i dont see it as a virtue.. especially since the fame machine eats way more than it can digest.

ah and read "the machine stops 1901.. em foster"...
he pegged those peky "how humands will use the web" perfectly--- 100 years ago.

anyhow-

You are asking people to read articles that are behind a paywall?

4 points to consider

1), an underlying presumption of the cyber technologies has an individualist cultural impetus derived principally out of the bay-area hippiedom of the 60s/70s that had such a defining influence on technology development from Palo Alto to Cupertino. The result is there is a lot of focus on what the technology does for the individual from a futurist perspective.

2), the dominant discourse of sociological approaches that try to have a broader understanding is based on the meta-research question 'what impact does technology have society?' At a bare minimum we need to invert this question. Optimally we need to understand that the relationship is at least double-helixical. However, this perhaps require a sociological-turn back to dialectical theories but there is a lot of career-investment in post-modern narratives.

3), McLuan's influence added to a de-historicism in Po-Mo discipline of techno-studies. I recall an interview toward the end of his career (although not the source) and I paraphrase: You don't drive on the highway using your rear-view mirror. Its a licence for academic futurism.

4), Stanley Fish.

As said here before rigorous material can come from both inside as well as outside of academia. I see many academics that aren't rigorous at all at their social media critique. Most of them don't talk about the power structure because they know unless they're optimistic about the internet's role, they won't be invited to work as a consultant or invited to lecture for entrepreneurs seeking for "inspirational advices".

Sorry Garry. I don't understand your comments. Except the last, and I can't see the relevance of that.
I am in the pre po mo generation.

This is an interesting discussion. I'm not an academic (n)or intellectual (so please forgive these ramblings). Also I wouldn't consider myself anti-intellectual. I am one of Jarvis' strongest detractors. I think someone needs to be more blunt and just come out and say that internet gurus are BS artists of the highest degree. Jarvis' true aim appears to be to sell himself every which way he can (books, consulting gigs, CUNY tenure, TWIT Network, etc). I think there is a growing number of average people like me who rely on people like Morozov to force the internet gurus to stand up to rigorous criticism.

I think the fact that Jarvis is a tenured CUNY professor misleads many into thinking he espouses the academic rigor you speak of, yet right here on this blog Jarvis says, "I did *not* set out to write an academic book." (Unfortunately, he is benefiting from the existing power structure by being introduced as a professor before going into soundbite mode selling his book.)

But you don't need to be a professor to see obvious problems with his ideas. He says that he personally benefited from discussing his cancer in public and uses this as an example of something that may get lost if we focus too much on privacy. I'm surprised no one asks him to explain the difference between private and personal. I don't think he's sharing private information, I think he's sharing personal information for the most part. I think most people have no problem with that.

Here's another example. On Leo Laporte's TWIT show, Triangulation (episode 28), Jarvis says that Leo Laporte is "...a model of how to live this public life." That's just plain ridiculous. Leo Laporte is a celebrity who spends all his time building and maintaining an audience so he can make money selling advertising. Here's the link: http://youtu.be/gEBeu_RQ9qQ (at about 40:00, but you should listen to the whole interview to get the context). Yet if you asked Jarvis to explain how Leo Laporte is a model of how to live the public life, I don't think Jarvis would be able to give a very good answer other than what is obvious: Leo Laporte is a performer and celebrity and sharing in the digital age Improves the way he works and lives (...and makes a lot of money).

I think one of the big problems with people like Jarvis and the other gurus cited is that they are hard to pin down. I've asked specific questions on Jarvis' blog and he's blocked me (I'm sure he knows who I am). There have been others who attempt to make Jarvis answer specifics about his arguments, but he never will. Even in this case you can see he feels satisfied to diffuse the criticism with many fragmented responses that never really answer the criticism and often produce more soundbites that his large fan base devours.

Private - you seem to be expressing a lot of anger about something that should spark debate and perhaps disagreement but which doesn't seem to me to be an anger-making issue.
Is there history between you and Jarvis on other matters?

I assume you have read Jarvis's detailed answers to Morozov - to which Morozov seems unwilling to link or, so far, to reply to. I am not convinced on some of the arguments Jarvis puts but it is an area worth debating. I don't see the source of the bile that is being vented...

"More importantly though, I feel like some of the people who’ve responded here should take some time to think about communication among human beings, and why people write and talk. It’s not always about power structures or about making money at the expense of others. Sometimes people just want to share their thoughts and hope to get you thinking as well."

sorry, but that really is too funny....the "internetwork" isnt functioning now for humans to communicate..it wasnt its birth purpose, and it had a samll run at that delusion for a few million of folks in the 90s...todays "facegoogled" communications net is to be monetized down to the lowest common text character or digit. the internet is a machine system that has already become machines feeding machines and very few humans caching/cashing out from the feces.;) all value taken, except for the machines hum of dataflow and the human clickers..

the "info dump" of blogs and human thoughts is nothign more than static to google and the lost hopes of advertisers who dont understand that machines dont buy soap...and that there careers are as dead as any who was "paid" to entertain of inform the monkeys..us...

tech celebrity is the last dump of the fame/paparaazi culture... jarvis and leo cash in on it as any PT barnum or Kardssian,,,but the true goals of their patrons- google,etc. is as they say..exactly as they say, to build a AI brain... a robot from any dystopian novel from the early 20th century that will do "their" bidding and remake the worlds people in their image.... more clickers on the machines keyboards. virtuality as life.

to serve man or for man to be served up too... ? well you all can decide which seems to be the current methodology...and then again, whos voting for any of this? click like or plus...;) dont matter - machine still rings up the same value.

the tool is the human who thinks of the computer as a tool...today. tommorrow?. we can only hope.

Nathan --

While I strongly share your desire to see academics engage more deeply with contemporary technology (both in their own work and in public forums where their approach might enrich the broader public discourse), I wonder about the specific terms you use to imagine what it is they would bring to the table.

You're conflating the specific flavor of critical theory that deals with power relations with the whole of academia. Granted this approach is incredibly widespread in the contemporary humanities, almost to the point where it has become the unconsidered premise of all culturally- and politically-oriented scholarship.

However, it feels to me like that conflation is a big part of the problem. In terms of this basic orientation, critical theory has become such a monoculture that you hardly need actual scholars to write the actual critiques you're calling for in order to know what they'd say, do you? Can't you predict exactly the discourse this approach would bring to contemporary technological issues like corporate-hosted social networks or drones? Can't you see exactly the mélange of Foucault-derived panopticism, Laura Mulvey-derived analysis of the male gaze, and Said-ian critique of Orientalism and race relations? Of some other mix of other such familiar and comforting flavors?

As an long-time enthusiast for that kind of work, the traditional practice of simply applying existing theories like these to new situations that come along is starting to feel quite stale to me. And I have a really hard time imagining it making a substantive contribution to the public debate, as you're calling for, that is anything more than a pro-for a defending of these long established positions, which both sheds no new light on current techno-social arrangements and is a long-proven failure at capturing the public imagination.

On the contrary, lately I've become increasingly interested in new philosophical and theoretical movements that begin from other premises than critique, for example, the philosophical movement of Object-Oriented Ontology. OOO arose out of deep philosophical positions but is in the process of being applied, by scholars like Ian Bogost, Levy Bryant, and Tim Morton, to a broad set of cultural, political, and even artistic areas ranging from game design to ecology to class politics.

These scholars (and the many others surrounding them in the larger discourse around OOO and related fields) are bringing the rigor of an academic philosophical/theoretical approach to exactly the kinds of issues you want to see discussed. What enables them to do so in a fresh way is not a simple decision to apply hoary doctrine to these new digital situations, but instead a much more difficult commitment to question and rethink a few of the important philosophical premises behind the humanities. What they win from that commitment is the ability to formulate fresh and challenging takes on exactly these vital issues whose presence in public debate you've correctly identified as urgently needed.

All they lose is a certainty of knowing the outcome of these inquiries (and hence their political effects) in advance.

Horse_ebooks