Douglas Rushkoff: Present Shock: Everything is Now
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- čas přidán 28. 08. 2024
- Douglas Rushkoff was one of 45 leading scholars, authors and activists who convened at The Great Hall of Cooper Union, New York City, on October 25-26, 2014, for the public presentation: "Techno-Utopianism and the Fate of the Earth." Speakers discussed the profound impacts-environmental, economic and social-of runaway technological expansionism and cyber immersion; the tendency to see technology as the savior for all problems. For more info, see ifg.org/techno-... .
Dr. Rushkoff is an author, teacher, and documentarian who focuses on the ways people, cultures, and institutions create, share, and influence each other's values. He is Professor of Media Studies and Digital Culture at CUNY/Queens, technology and media commentator for CNN, digital literacy advocate for codecademy.com and a lecturer on media, technology, culture, and economics around the world. He is also a winner of the Media Ecology Association's first Neil Postman Award for career achievement in public intellectual activity.
His new book, "Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now," explores the always-on, simultaneous society in which we live, as well as how this new temporal landscape influences media, culture, economics, politics, and meaning. His previous best-selling books on media and popular culture have been translated to over thirty languages. They include "Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age," a followup to his Frontline documentary, "Digital Nation," and "Life Inc," an analysis of the corporate spectacle, which was also made into a short, award-winning film.
His other books include "Cyberia," "Media Virus," "Playing the Future," "Nothing Sacred: The Truth about Judaism," "Get Back in the Box: Innovation from the Inside Out and Coercion," winner of the Marshall McLuhan Award for best media book. Rushkoff also wrote the acclaimed novels "Ecstasy Club" and "Exit Strategy" and graphic novel, "Club Zero-G." He wrote the graphic novels "Testament" and "A.D.D.," for Vertigo.
He has written and hosted three award-winning PBS Frontline documentaries - "The Merchants of Cool" looked at the influence of corporations on youth culture, "The Persuaders," about the cluttered landscape of marketing, and new efforts to overcome consumer resistance, and "Digital Nation," about life on the virtual frontier. Most recently, he made "Generation Like," an exploration of teens, marketers, and social media.
This guy is very comfortable in speaking in front of people, so comfortable that he just speaks as to whatever comes to his mind and because of that you see him spirally off continually to things that don't truly contribute to his point in the way that he intended and has to back track or throw himself back onto course to get his point across as intended.
Point about the time is now but then two times wants to go in the direction of religion and it doesn't accentuate is point well.
He is a technology theorist and to a point he made at 11:48 "We can't be goal oriented not only because we're constantly living in the constant interruption of digital media and because we've passed a digital threshold."
It's acceptable to be in the constant interruption of technology because we chose not to program and now we have been programmed to be a part of that world like it or not.
Then he brings up his comparison to an RPG game where you can do whatever you want and it's not really based around finishing the game it's how long can I play this game and keep it interesting.
And that's where I try to derive meaning from this talk, you program yourself at all times, whatever you choose to put your time towards you're choosing to orient your thoughts and life, because you are your thoughts and you create your life.
The future is not a role playing game. The future is poetry. This is why hip hop is so relevant. This is why Twitter is so relevant. Language is changing, language is becoming more concise.
John Sabp you like pictures of men who look like balloons that are about to pop
The human at this stage is just a nanny for computers. As a programmer, I'm constantly searching for more "elegance," which means, basically, slicker and smoother ways for things to be done. But the computer world is like a rigid matrix, while the human world is like gauzy nets and webs. Yet we keep building the computer matrix ever more encompassing and rigid. In order to subscribe to this matrix building, you don't really need to buy into some "narrative;" rather, you just do your job in the most elegant and logical way you can. Narrative? Maybe techies are Star Trek or Star Wars fans in their private lives. But then what's the take-away from Star Wars? Some hazy sort of Zen Buddhism. And from Star Trek? A sort of blind adventurism tempered, maybe, by Vulcan Zen Buddhism. Still, I say the human really needs a Story, a narrative. We really don't like not having at least some idea of why we're doing what we're doing. And no, just to keep ahead of the bill collectors is not sustaining, other than in some negative way. And no, false modesty, i.e., "Oh gosh, I'm just the little man," doesn't cut it, either.
The Singularity is not much different from Arthur C. Clarke's whole "2001/Childhood's End" scenario: We progress to the next stage of being, which is some extra-biological networked Borg-like thingy. Right. But something tells me it won't be so easily done. A long time ago I speculated that any sort of real AI (not this statistical-based imitation thereof) would produce madness in the AI entity, that the only way to handle sentience and cognition is to also be a physical being in a meaningfully rich environment. But then I watched the movie "Transcendence" and my idea was sort of swiped.
Anyway, DR has a lot going on in his head.
There is still a Fight. The Game is not yet Over. AI is coming to get us and Team Human has got to win.
big up! i'd choose ...have chosen.. the msintainance of that
Google the people who control the media, banks, democrat party, aclu, etc. in this country and you will see a common religion.
WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT
+Cognito Vita Pay attention.
+trini13archer I don't lack the ability to pay attention. it is just confusing
Nothing is good oin this world, thank you for your translation
It's a bit late after seven months, but I will reply nevertheless.
What Rushkoff is actually saying is that we're constantly being distracted from finding out what we really value in life. It's a distraction from yourself and it's by design. Its objective is to diminish people to mindless consumers who are not dedicating their lives to finding out what they really value. It's meant to make us believe that life is about how much money we make, how much status we can accumulate, how much (mostly useless) stuff we can buy, and how we are perceived and acknowledged in our narrow social (media) bubble.
Think, for example, about all the choices you have to make as a consumer day after day. It will often leave you wondering, either consciously or somewhere in the back of your mind, if you chose the right product from the huge amount of available options (e.g. a laptop). It's called 'the paradox of choice'. But if you had just two good quality options to choose from, it would make it much, much easier to find out which product you like best. You can easily try them both and make an informed decision. Endless choice is sold as consumer freedom to make lifestyle decisions, but what it usually results in is a state of mind in which you are:
- busy making insignificant choices of which you'll never truly know if they are the right ones;
- distracted from thinking and making choices about what is REALLY important to you!
After all, you can't buy a lifestyle, personality or self-worth... that's something that comes from (deep) within yourself.
It might be that you don't get what Rushkoff is talking about because you're a victim of this distraction yourself, and way too plugged into the system of distraction to recognize that you're being manipulated to comply with it for much of the time. But I don't know you, so it's up to you to decide if that's the case.