A Review of and a Reflection on Douglas Rushkoffs Book Present Shock
Robert K. Logan (logan@physics.utoronto.ca)
In his book (published in 2013 by Current of the Penguin Group) Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now Douglas Rushkoff presents a shocking and compelling description of the impact of digit media on contemporary society, its institutions and culture, as well as economics, business, politics and governance. The main theme of Present Shock is that with digital technology we now live in the eternal present, the always on Now.
By choosing the title Present Shock for his book Rushkoff is underscoring the contrast with Toffler?s book Future Shock and the shift from the concern of the 1970s with the future to today?s exclusive focus on the present, the immediate now and hence the shock of the present. Rushkoff identifies five aspects of ?present shock? to which he devotes one of the five chapters of his book.
Chapter 1: Narrative Collapse, as the title suggests, deals with the collapse of narrative as exemplified by the shift from dramas that have a beginning, a middle and an end to stories on TV series like Lost, The Sopranos, Boardwalk Empire and Game of Thrones which relate never ending stories or the present schlock of reality TV which provides viewers with a slice of bizarre, banal and salacious life. Other indication of the collapse of narrative that Rushkoff identifies include the shift from zero sum team sports like baseball and football to extreme sports like snow boarding; the popularity of role playing games like Dungeons and Dragons, which go on and on never reaching an end point or resolution; and the emergence of the 24 x 7 news channels like CNN that feature news stories as they happen in contrast with the half hour news shows that first populated network television and which feature a number of news stories each with their own individual narratives.
Chapter 2: Digiphrenia deals with the mismatch between the natural rhythms of our biology and our psyches and the time demands of our digital media with their incessant and incipient demands for our attention and the way they force us to make choices among the information overload they constantly bombard us with. ?By dividing our attention between our digital extensions, we sacrifice our connection to the truer present in which we are living (p. 75).? Digital technologies allow us to be in more than one place at a time and in more than one time frame at a time. ?Instead of demanding that our technologies conform to ourselves and our own innate rhythms, we strive to become more compatible with our technologies and the new cultural norms their timelessness implies (p. 95).? Rushkoff suggests that with digital media we confuse the two kinds of times that the ancient Greeks designated by kairos, which is human time or timing and chronos the flow of time on a clock or a computer.
We are driven by the time demands of our computer technology rather than the natural rhythms of our bodies and psyches. In addition to the mismatch between the kairos and chronos there is the additional problem that the gap is widening in that not only is change constantly taking place but the pace or rate of change is also accelerating. Having identified digiphrenia, Rushkoff still holds out the hope that digiphrenia does not have to be necessarily dystopic. He suggests, ?for while digital technology can serve to disconnect us from the cycles that have traditionally orchestrated our activities, they can also serve to bring us back into sync (p. 109).?
Chapter 3 Overwinding deals basically with the way in which the future is discounted and short changed has grown even worse with digital technologies. Using the metaphor of computing Rushkoff suggests that we confuse storage for the future with RAM or processing for the present. In other words as a result of the immediate demands that our computer technology creates resources that should be allocated to storage for future use are frittered away to satisfy and process our immediate needs.
In this chapter Rushkoff also describes the evolution of money and commerce starting with local economies and currencies that emerged in the late Middle Ages and were subsequently transformed into national currencies that led to the emergence of the capitalist system, which he subtly critiques. He then demonstrates that the capitalist system?s demand for growth combined with the way computer technology accelerated the pace of trading resulted in the disastrous emergence of derivatives and their trading, which in turn led to the collapse of the mortgaging system and housing prices so that many home owners found that their houses were under water. I found Rushkoff?s simple and straightforward description of the origin and evolution of our market driven capitalistic economic system a tour de force.
In Chapter 4 Fractalnoia Rushkoff explores the consequence that with digital media all information comes at us at once and that there is a collapse of a time line, so that we live in the eternal present. As a result we do not see the causal connections of events and things so instead we look for patterns in which everything is connect to everything else. This pattern of ?everything is everything? Rushkoff likens to fractal patterns. Not understanding the connections of things or how they came into being creates a certain level of paranoia, which Rushkoff describes as fractalnoia from which he draws the title of his chapter. ?Without time, we can?t understand things in terms of where they came from or where they are going to. We can?t relate to things as having purpose or intention, beginnings or endings (p. 199).? Because of the lack of the understanding of how things develop through time folks ?look for patterns where none exist (p. 201).? Another affect that Rushkoff identi
fies is young people?s loss of individuality and their need for privacy. His real concern, however, is whether or not we can survive as a society given the effects of fractalnoia. ?Learning how to recognize and exploit patterns without falling into full-fledged fractalnoia will soon be a required survival skill for individuals, businesses, and even nations (p. 205).?
In Chapter 5 Apocalypto Rushkoff explains the rise of the phenomenon of apocalypto, ?a belief in the imminent shift of humanity into an unrecognizably different form (p. 245),? which he attributes to the fact that ?the hardest part of living in present shock is that there?s no end and, for that matter, no beginning (p. 247).? Rushkoff catalogues various apocalyptic scenarios that range from the fascination with zombies, the end of time scenarios like Teilhard de Chardin?s Omega Point to the ?techno-enthusiast extropians? like Ray Kurzweil and Kevin Kelly in which the intelligence of our computers overtake human intelligence (i.e. the Singularity) and transform us humans into a post-human reality in which we are some combination of carbon and silicon or we become enslaved by our intelligent machines. As with the other excesses of present shock Rushkoff provides us with a comforting antidote when he writes, ?As I have come to understand technology, however, it wants only whatever we program into it (p. 257).? Here Rushkoff reiterates the theme of his previous 2010 book Program or Be Programmed.
As Rushkoff describes present shock he at the same time gives us shrewd observations of how media (particularly TV), politics, business and the capitalist economy work. He introduces us to the ideas and thinking of many contemporary thinkers and a few older ones, half of whom I have to admit were new to me. He is able to encapsulate and/or critique their thinking in a page or two and sometimes in a sentence or two. They include in alphabetical order: Robert Axelrod, Gregory Bateson, Frank Baum, Jean Baudrillard, Gordon Bell, Stewart Brand, Freeman Dyson, Mark Fillipi, Freidrich Hayek, Kevin Kelly, Alfred Korzybski, Ray Kurzweil, Benoit Mandelbrot, Dennis and Terence McKenna, Michael Moritz, John Nash, Laszlo Mero, Richard Nisbett, Robert Prechter, the folks at the Rand Corporation, Albert Rizzo, Tea Party members, Philip Tetlock, and Norbert Weiner. These sketches of our cultural institutions and innovative thinkers makes Rushkoffs book extremely interesting and entertaining to read.
Having lavished Rushkoff with well-deserved praise for his fascinating book I will now spend some time on a few quibbles. I do this in the spirit of the peer-to-peer communication that he has identified in his book given that we are peers by virtue of our active participation in the Media Ecology Association. It is certainly the case that Rushkoff is an admirer of McLuhan and references him a number of times. There are a few instances, however, where his insights were foreshadowed by McLuhan and I think that is worth pointing out. I am sure Douglas came to these on his own but the parallel with McLuhan?s thought is worth pointing out.
Rushkoff?s idea that the past, present and future all collapse into the eternal present was expressed by McLuhan in 1970 when he wrote, «we live in post-history in the sense that all pasts that ever were are now present to our consciousness and that all the futures that will be are here now.» Rushkoff?s observation that we are constantly confronted with choices for our attention because of information overload is another idea that can be found in McLuhan in Culture is our Business where he wrote, ?One of the effects of living with electric information is that we live habitually in a state of information overload. There’s always more than you can cope with.? A similar theme is found in The Medium is the Massage where he wrote, ?Ours is a brand-new world of all-at-once-ness. ?Time? has ceased, ?space? has vanished. We now live in a ?global village??a simultaneous happening. Information pours upon us, instantaneously and continuously. As soon as information is acquired, it is very rapidly replaced by still newer information.? McLuhan also pointed out that with electrically configured information young people would be more interested in roles rather than a job and specific goals. This could be a reason why role-playing games and non-zero sum sports have become so popular as Rushkoff points out.
Be that as it may, what makes Rushkoff?s book so important is that he contextualizes some of these insights of McLuhan in terms of our contemporary culture. And of course he did much more as I alluded to above. But there is one idea that Rushkoff formulates where he goes one better than McLuhan. Both maintain that we are in touch with the past, present and the future but Rushkoff points out that with digital media, ?We live all of our ages at once.? From McLuhan I learned that with electric media I am aware of all cultures and all times past, present and future but not that I experience them simultaneously all at once. This is where Rushkoff updates and goes beyond McLuhan by taking into account that with the additional speedup and acceleration of the flow of information with digital media compared to the electric mass media of McLuhan?s time we are not just aware of all times past, present and future but we actually live them and experience them all at once, simultaneously.
For me the big contribution of Doug Rushkoff is that he provides example after example of how digital media differ from electric mass media because of the massive peer-to-peer communication, the digital instantaneous networking and the hyperlinking of information that digital media make possible. Through his examples of the many effects of digital media he presented the evidence for a conjecture I made in my 2002 paper ?The Five Ages of Communication? In that paper I suggested that McLuhan?s three ages of oral, written and electric communications had to be updated to include five ages, first by adding a pre-oral stage of mimetic communication that existed before humans had verbal communication and in which they communicated by non-verbal vocalization, facial gestures, hand signals and body language. The fifth communication age I posited was that of digital communication, which I suggested represented a bifurcation from the electric mass media studied by McLuhan to today?s current digital age. Rushkoff has shown through induction that my positing that bifurcation by abduction was indeed justified.
I will end my review by urging the reader of this review to read Present Shock for its richness, its insights and for its entertainment value. It is a superlative piece of work, Rushkoff?s magnum opus to date. I do not know how he will top this one.
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