WE - Sunday, August 24, 2008 10:36 - 12 Comments

Here we go: we_magazine Vol.01 is available!

I got my first idea about ‘we-magazine’ in February 2008 at the DIY (do it yourself) Video Summit in Los Angeles which Henry Jenkins was also attending. He called his blog post on the Summit “From youtube to wetube”.

During those two eventful days it gradually dawned on me what enormous power the Internet has for shaping our understanding of “we” and of just what “we” are capable of moving and shaking in the age of the World Wide Web – a range of huge opportunities comes into sight only matched in scale by the challenges they bring with them!

Turning them into a quarterly magazine became my fixed goal. And now you have it before you – the very first issue of we-magazine! Special thanks go to Markus Beckedahl, Steffen Bueffel and Bea Gschwend without whose bright ideas and active help the magazine would never have got off the ground. And thanks too to all our authors for the trust they have shown in us and for their articles and interviews which offer such insights into their own personal “we”.

we-magazine is international. Even if the authors in this issue are mainly from Europe and America, this obviously doesn’t mean that Asia and Africa will be out of our focus. As you’ll see in the next issues.

We’re very much moving on the “cutting edge” with the topics we deal with and we warmly welcome the highly controversial viewpoints put forward by our authors which are first and foremost intended to stimulate discussion and debate. All this territory is so new and unexplored that we’ve very little experience to fall back on. As Stuart Kauffman puts it so well in the opening sentence of his article, “We are at a hinge of global history and need all we can muster to manage safe passage.”

Cross-media from the very outset, we-magazine is also an experiment. We posted all the texts online and sell a PDF and print version via lulu.com – a marketplace for online publishing and selling. We think that this kind of approach comes closest to the we-idea and the spirit of the Internet.

Issue 2 will be launched on 13 February 2009 from HomeBase in Berlin!