Public Individual: A Course

The title, Public Individual, refers to the concept of the persona as it is expressed in social spaces. There are a lot of quasi-coherent blogs offering limited (and limiting) advice on personal branding, or on developing social media skills, however not much thought seems to be put to the psychological processes at play, or the implications behind ‘doubling’ oneself online.

Writing a book about social media presents its own challenges, many of which I hope to be able to overcome by using this site as a living document, a set of virtual appendices that exist concurrently with the final published book.

Online Social Optimization or OSO is what I began calling the practical applications of this research and my previous theoretical modeling I’d been doing with Edward while writing The Art of Memetics.

My goal isn’t to teach you How to “use Twitter” but rather to understand how and why Twitter is currently used, and what that functionality provides, and what to do if it fails or dies a year from now. Hence the spreadsheets I can update and share publicly, which allow me to keep a real-time document easily accessible.

Currently this is a site under development. You can peruse what is completed by using this table of contents, which will update as I complete each module.