People You Should Be Listening To About #OccupyBoston: David Carr and Danah Boyd

Photo credit: Shorenstein Center

One of our favorite old-media curmudgeons, the New York Times columnist DAVID CARR, got together over at Harvard over the weekend with one of the smartest people on the internet, DANAH BOYD, to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the SHORENSTEIN CENTER FOR PRESS AND PUBLIC POLICY. Instead of talking about the press, they ended up talking about Occupy Wall Street -- decoding, for the assembled academics, what distributed-networking folks find beautiful about the movement. Like, that Occupants have come together not to support a specific issue -- although Carr suggests "rich people stole all our money" as a defensible one-sentence mission statement -- but instead to investigate the sources of their mutual discontent. [More info, background, and live blog over at the Shorenstein site.]

Every movement needs its public intellectuals to unpack what at first seems like chaos and then begins to unfold as a new paradigm. If you've been searching for how to talk about #Occupy, here's a master class:

DOWNLOAD: David Carr and Danah Boyd at Harvard's Shorenstein Center [mp3]

FULL COVERAGE: Occupy Boston