Dan Gillmor Releases New Book
Mediactive

In this compelling text, Dan Gillmor explores the new rules for engagement within the media ecosystem–for both content creators and users. Dan’s proposal for making news useful to us, as citizens and consumers, is ambitious. He wants us to become mediactive—active users of media—to help us live up to the idea of literacy. Literacy, in any medium means not just know how to read that medium, but also how to create in it, and to understand the difference between good and bad uses.

Dan offers a framework, first for thinking of ourselves as active consumers with the necessary virtues of skepticism and patience with complex stories, and with very practical guidelines for making judgments about the trustworthiness of stories and sources. His framework then extends to us as producers, offering a simple but informative guide to many of the ways that we can make our own media and put it out in the public, advising each of us to participate on the network and also have a home base online that we control. In furthering his commitment to the “active” part of being mediactive, Dan offers suggestions on how each of us can be a trustworthy source of information, beyond simply vetting others.

Learn more about Dan Gillmor.