Jeremiah Owyang (b. 1972)
Filed under the name Jeremiah · June 15, 2026
Jeremiah Owyang made his name as an early researcher of social media and what's now called the sharing economy, subjects I will confess I understand largely through the patient explanations of my assistant, who handles my email and has on more than one occasion had to explain to me, slowly, what an app actually is. I find this entire category of expertise faintly alarming and genuinely fascinating in roughly equal measure, which I gather is a fairly common reaction among people my age confronting how quickly ordinary commerce and social life have been rearranged by technology I did not grow up with and have never quite caught up to. Owyang was apparently identifying these shifts early, before most people, myself very much included, understood what was happening or why it mattered. I try to resist being dismissive of expertise simply because its subject matter is unfamiliar to me; that particular blind spot has embarrassed me before, and I'd rather admit ignorance plainly than pretend a sharper understanding I plainly do not have.