I’m a writer, social media professional and general London geek-about-town. I graduated from Oxford with an English degree in 2002, and have been exploring what it means to be a writer (or just someone who’s mainly good at writing), in one form or another, ever since. I’ve worked as a copywriter, as an editor, as a publications manager. I’ve done stuff in PR and online communities and cult ezines, in designing and promoting events, co-founded an award-winning web startup, written a film script that ended up screening at the NFT, and am currently working on a couple of cross-platform entertainment projects.

Whereas twenty years ago the bedroom cosmonauts of the World Wide Web were regarded as a strange subspecies, today networked culture is increasingly at the forefront. Geek memes bleed over into the real world; no London freesheet is complete without its Facebook story. Rather than offering an alternative to offline discourse, Web culture increasingly defines it. That creates problems as well as opportunities; but it is, inescapably, where we are today.

I believe that in recognising this we can engage creatively with an emerging culture that’s digitally-mediated but not digitally alienated. We can re-learn the place of the written word, in the context of - but not hidebound by - the tradition of print writing and the print book. As writers, creatives, and simply people with agency, we can learn to dance amid, and make our marks upon, the shifting sandbanks of the networked world.

Oh, and my name isn’t really Sebastian Mary - it’s good old simple Mary. I gained ‘Sebastian’ for reasons that are too complicated to sum up here, and these days I just like it as an online handle…