Preview: After skimming the chapters of Present Shock, I have discovered that Rushkoff is going to describe this phenomenon in five stages. The stages are narrative collapse, digiphrenia, overwinding, fractalnoia, and apocalypto. The first few stages will explain how present shock came to be. I am excited to learn about how we transitioned from a fixation on the future to being frozen in the present. It seems like he gives a lot of stories and examples to illustrate his ideas, so hopefully that will bring to life the concepts of present shock.
Early Social Proof: After explaining the concept, I asked my roommates about their opinions on present shock. We talk a lot about progressive ideas like this, so I was interested in what they had to say. They thought it was an interesting, sad, and valid concept. We started discussing why we can't think progressively anymore. Why are we frozen? New technology is made in order make the now better instead of improving life. It is about what is going to make life more convenient. What about people who don't have computers, whose lives are not convenient? They are probably in more a of survivalist mode. We don't have to do much to survive anymore. In the 60s, everything changed. The youth of the 60s were raised by people who survived the Great Depression and WWII. They knew they could give their children more, and they even almost coddled their children. Those children grew up to become hippies and rally against the war that was now visible from the home. It started our fixation on the present. My roommate said she thought it was the first generation raised without a strong sense of responsibility to survival. She said that once you reach that mindset, you can't ever go back. You start sliding into what is easier. A focus on making our present lives easier is what characterizes our generation. Present Shock discusses our search for an end, which is manifested through our obsession with the zombie apocalypse. Ironically, we paused an episode of The Walking Dead to discuss this.
Similar Books: The first book that Amazon and Google recommended was, of course, Future Shock by Alvin Toffler. This book discusses the fixation on the future that Rushkoff says is over. Another book I saw was Program or Be Programmed, another book by Douglas Rushkoff. This discusses the immediacy of the internet and how it is everywhere. He talks about how to master it rather than it mastering us. Alone Together by Sherry Turkle talks about why we expect more from technology and less from each other. This is one aspect I am interested in finding out more about while I read Present Shock.
Who Cares? As I searched Twitter under #presentshock, I was surprised to find a few musicians and radio personalities in the mix. After some more thought, however, this makes total sense: music is an area affected by present shock. Our demand to have it now forces a decline on waiting for the release of an album, attending a concert, etc. Another group of people who care is the IEET (Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies). They highlighted Rushkoff and posted a link to a video of his. Their post had 776 hits, so I think the topic is reaching a wide scope of people through the IEET's support. It seems like Rushkoff is very active on Twitter, so I followed him and tweeted at him. I hope he responds. I plan to formulate a couple more tweets as I continue with my research. I have also come across a lot of professors who are interested in and/or teaching present shock. One professor from Wisconsin said that she read one of her student's essays that connected Walden to Rushkoff's ideas of present shock.
Formal Reviews: The formal review I found most helpful was the New York Times review of Present Shock. Janet Maslin reviews Rushkoff's work and calls it "one of those invaluable books that make sense of what we already half-know." She suggests that we have a subconscious awareness of present shock. We know that we are stuck. I wonder if we also know, as Rushkoff insinuates, that we are searching for an end. Maslin asks the questions, "Now that a single Facebook post can have as much impact as 30 years’ worth of scholarship, how do we analog creatures navigate the digital landscape? How do we shield ourselves from distraction, or gravitate to what really matters?" We pay attention to human interaction and try to monitor what we are doing to each other through media.
Informal Reviews: I found a blog called Zero Hedge that discusses present shock in the context of the fantasy of change, a term that the author came up with to describe the constant incoherent flux of digital input. He says about the consequences of present shock: "This phenomenon also has broader cultural and economic manifestations. The flattening of history and narrative generates a distortion field around the present, persuading us it is largely impervious to disruptive change. For example, millions of Millennials (born 1982-2004) are pursuing high-cost university educations in the belief that multiple degrees are now essential to being offered a job. Even as evidence piles up that the economy has changed in fundamental ways such that even advanced degrees no longer inoculate the owner against financial insecurity, millions of young people feel they have no choice but to indebt themselves and spend scarce family resources on a questionable-value education." This was a particularly interesting notion to me since I fall into that category quite explicitly. This author's idea of present shock affecting change is another notion that I might want to explore in my research with Present Shock.
Education Courses:
I found a syllabus that included Present Shock for an online class called Science Fiction to Science Fabrication. I also found a class at the University of Nebraska called Being Human in a Digital Age. They also read Present Shock.
Multimedia: Douglas Rushkoff has done a lot of interviews and talks about Present Shock. Here is a link to a YouTube video of Rushkoff presenting his ideas at TEDx. By surfing Flickr, I found this picture of him presenting in the PBS Newsroom. It seems that people are latching onto this idea of present shock. I think that it's happening that way because it is a speculation and observation of a current state rather than of a past state or future state.
First Impressions of This Book: After the reading I have done, I have gotten through the first section called Narrative Collapse. There was a part of this section that was a little disheartening for me as an English major, and that is Rushkoff's belief that presentism is obscuring narrativity and causing it to decline. He talks about how video games are an example of a response to the decline of stories. He says, "Instead of panicking at the death of the story, players become the story and delight in acting it out in real time." Today's young people become the equivalent of storytellers themselves. They become an "expert" on something, like snowboarding, and then they master the landscape. "Like their peers in other pursuits, they are playing winnerless, infinite games." This is just one response to the idea of presentism.
My Thoughts So Far: By doing this research, I feel more prepared to dive into this book. I am excited to pull out certain ideas that result from present shock. As my title indicates, I am interested in finding out how present shock characterizes interaction and digital use by people. I found in one of the blogs I perused that Rushkoff's concern was how we are treating each other through media use. I think that exploring the personal connection through the idea of present shock will yield some interesting results.
This book seems super interesting to me, thanks for previewing it! I'm confused a little bit about his idea you discuss in our "First Impressions" section. Why is it bad that today's young people are becoming storytellers themselves through videogames? It would seem like that makes stories more important, not less. Maybe I'm just not seeing his bigger point there.
ReplyDeleteMaybe he is concerned that videogames are coming at the expense of more traditional methods of storytelling, such as novels. I don't see any problem with storytelling through videogames as long as there is still some sort of balance maintained (neither all videogames or even all novels)
ReplyDeleteThis certainly will be interesting. I'm intrigued by the idea of examining how our present situation impacts the way we interact with each other in the digital world. There are certainly the extremes of cyber-bullying, but it's interesting to also think of the facebook stereotypes, the one who constantly complains, the one who likes everything....it's almost upsetting if a close friend doesn't "like" something you post. So that would be really interesting to think about how our digital relationships affect our real life relationships as well.
ReplyDeleteI don't know that he actually sees it as a negative thing. I kind of just read that part briefly, so I'll have to go back and read more carefully. But it sounded like he was just recording it as a consequence of present shock and showing the shift that was taking place. He was also emphasizing that the stories circulating due to video games are ones of digitization rather than something that has been passed down through generations (though I think that some video games include accurate history, so that's another issue to look at). I will do a little more research on that section and maybe write a separate blog post about it.
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