This week, we read Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus Why I assigned this book There are a few different kinds of value that government agencies can wring from social media. The first is simply to use it as a venue for engaging citizens. Another is to listen to citizens as they talk to one another. StillRead… Read more »
This week, we read Farhad Manjoo’s True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society Why I assigned this reading This is the first book we’ve read that throws some cold water on social media in government. The central thesis–to which we’ve all been exposed–is that people have pretty much made up their minds aboutRead… Read more »
This week we read Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. Why I assigned this text Every medium creates its own orthodoxy. You can tweet that. And the reason you can tweet that is because the technical strictures of Twitter push effective tweets to the limits of the sense:syllable ratio,Read… Read more »
This week, we read selections from Connected, by Nicholas Christakis. Why I Assigned This Text This is the second of two texts that focus exclusively on how social media/social networks function and the relationship between people’s online social behavior and their offline activities. There are a few key concepts that this text brings into sharpRead… Read more »
The Web Manager University launched a pilot 12-week class this week that explores in-depth, the issues pertaining to social media in government. In each class meeting, we read excerpts from one book, listen to (and ask questions of) one expert in a field related the reading and the topic of the day, and then movesRead… Read more »