Your Wonkette Book Club Will Now Dominate Your Media Diet With This Book About Covering The Arab Spring With A Smartphone

As we mentioned last weekend, Your Wonkette is starting a book club thingie, because why wouldn't we? Here's the dealio: pretty much every month, we will select a book, announce that selection, and give the Wonkettariat some three weeks or so to read it, followed by a review and a nice long discussion. Unlike a real-world book club, we will not be able to meet at a coffee shop and enjoy baked goods while we talk about the book. On the upside, you will not have to leave the house or wear pants.

Our inaugural selection will be Andy Carvin's  Distant Witness: Social Media, the Arab Spring and a Journalism Revolution.  Carvin, NPR's social media guy, writes about how the activists of the Arab Spring used social media to organize, how he sort of accidentally became one of the most prominent people covering the revolutions, and how Twitter and other new media are changing journalism and the way we consume news. Go get yourself a copy (details below) and start reading; we're planning our big review / wrap-up discussion post for sometime during the week ofFeb. 25 to March 1 Updated: More like March 5 at noon EDT. Along with that post, we will host a livechat so that you can simulate the conversational chaos of a real book club meeting! (We're even going to see if we can arrangeWe have arranged to have Mr. Carvin to join us for the livechat, YAY!but can't promise anything.)

To whet your appetite, here is a video of Andy Carvin discussing his book a couple weeks ago with Brooke Gladstone of NPR. If you don't have an hour for the video (and you can come back to it, you know), you might want to listen to On the Media's   excerpt of the conversation, which is a more manageable 18 minutes.

 Distant Witness: Social Media, the Arab Spring and a Journalism Revolution, by Andy Carvin.

• HardSoftcover $20 or e-book $10 at CUNY Journalism Press. 

• Kindle e-book (which provides a happy kickback to Your Wonkette) $9.99 at Amazon. 

• Nook e-book $10 at Barnes & Noble (but no kickback to Wonkette, alas).

• Free for nothing at your socialist public library; if your library doesn't have it, try interlibrary loan and tell them to waste less money on books about sparkly emo vampires for chrissakes.

 Check out Wonkette on Facebook and Twitter and even on Tumblr. And since there's always the chance he might start covering revolutions, too, you can follow Doktor Zoom on Twitter, also, too.