Present Shock

* Book: PRESENT SHOCK: When Everything Happens Now. By Douglas Rushkoff. Penguin, 2013.

URL = http://rushkoff.com/present-shock

Description

Publishers Weekly:

"“Whether or not readers are familiar with the concept of presentism—the theory that society is more focused on the immediacy of the moment in front of them (actually more specifically on the moment that just passed) than the moment before or, perhaps more importantly, the future—they’ve certainly felt the increasing pressure of keeping up with various methods of communication, be it texting, Web surfing, live interactions, or a litany of other media for staying “connected.” Using Alvin Toffler’s concept of “future shock” as a jumping-off point, media theorist Douglas Rushkoff (Cyberia; Get Back in the Box; Media Virus; etc.) deftly weaves in a number of disparate concepts (the Home Shopping Network, zombies, Kurzweil’s Law of Accelerating Returns, Internet mashups, hipsters’ approximation of historical ephemera as irony, etc.) to examine the challenge of keeping up with technological advances as well as their ensuing impact on culture and human relations in a world that’s always “on.” By highlighting five areas (the rise of moronic reality TV; our need to be omnipresent; the need to compress time in order to achieve our goals; the compulsion to connect unrelated concepts in an effort to make better sense of them; and a gnawing sense of one’s obsolescence), Rushkoff gives readers a healthy dose of perspective, insight, and critical analysis that’s sure to get minds spinning and tongues wagging.”

Contents

"It’s not that everyone is supposed to be doing things faster, so much as in the present tense. No more hard drive, everything in RAM. It’s like living on an Atkins diet, with no starch or carbs to hold you. It’s all right now. The first casualty of presentism, and the easiest to see in our culture, is the collapse of narrative. Without time, without any history, how do you tell a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end? What happens to the typical TV show? A kid with a remote control can skip to another channel a whole lot easier than sitting through your exposition or, worse, your commercial. Musicians don’t release albums so much as iTunes singles. University curriculums are consumed a la carte by online students. People can no longer be motivated with goals or rewards, because the notion of a journey is itself anathema to a world where everything is supposed to be happening in the present." (http://changethis.com/manifesto/show/104.01.PresentShock)

Douglas Ruskoff:

“The book is divided into five sections, corresponding to the fi ve main ways that present shock manifests for us. We begin with the collapse of narrative. How do we tell stories and convey values without the time required to tell a linear story? How does pop culture continue to function without traditional storylines, and how does politics communicate without grand narratives? We move on to “Digiphrenia”—the way our media and technologies encourage us to be in more than one place at the same time. We’ll see that our relationship to time has always been defi ned by the technologies we use to measure it, and that digital time presents particular challenges we haven’t had to contend with before. In “Overwinding,” we look at the effort to squish really big timescales into much smaller ones. It’s the effort to make the passing moment responsible for the sorts of effects that actually take real time to occur. In particular, what does this do to business and fi nance, which are relying on increasingly derivative forms of investment? Next we look at what happens when we try to make sense of our world entirely in the present tense. Without a timeline through which to parse causes and effects, we instead attempt to draw connections from one thing to another in the frozen moment, even when such connections are forced or imaginary. It’s a desperate grasp for real- time pattern recognition I’ll call “Fractalnoia.” Finally, we face “Apocalypto”—the way a seemingly infi nite present makes us long for endings, by almost any means necessary.

We will encounter drone pilots contending with the stress of dropping bombs on a distant war zone by remote control before driving home to the suburbs for supper an hour later. We will see the way the physical real estate of Manhattan is being optimized for the functioning of the ultrafast trading algorithms now running the stock market— as well as what this means for the human traders left in the wake. We will encounter doomsday “preppers” who stock up on silver coins and ready-to-eat meals while dismissing climate change as a conspiracy theory hatched by Al Gore and since exposed in an email scandal. 3 We will consider the “singularity”—as well as our scientifi c community’s response to present shock— especially for the ways it mirrors the religious extremism accompanying other great social shifts throughout history.

Most important, we will consider what we human beings can do to pace ourselves and our expectations when there’s no temporal backdrop against which to measure our progress, no narrative through which to make sense of our actions, no future toward which we may strive, and seemingly no time to fi gure any of this out.

I suggest we intervene on our own behalf— and that we do it right now, in the present moment. When things begin accelerating wildly out of control, sometimes patience is the only answer. Press pause.

We have time for this."

Review

Janet Maslin:

""Present Shock" is one of those invaluable books that make sense of what we already half-know. Playing on the title of Alvin Toffler's influential 1970 "Future Shock,"which sounded an alarm about what Mr. Toffler called "a personal perception of too much change in too short a period of time," Douglas Rushkoff analyzes a very different phenomenon. The future arrived a little while ago, he posits - maybe with Y2K, maybe with Sept. 11. Now it's here. And we are stuck with "a diminishment of everything that isn't happening right now - and the onslaught of everything that supposedly is." Mr. Toffler warned that we would be unready for this onslaught. Mr. Rushkoff is more analytical than alarmist. He divides his thoughts into five sections addressing five kinds of profound change, and his biggest illustration of present shock has to do with the actual book itself. Because the present is more full of interruptions than the past was, it took him extra time to write. Because its ideas aren't glib, he says, "here I am writing opera when the people are listening to singles." And he realizes that data-swamped readers may take longer to finish books now. Coming from him the phrase "thanks for your time" has new meaning.

"Present Shock" begins by simply describing how we have lost our capacity to absorb traditional narrative. It goes on to explain what we have used to replace it. There was a time, Mr. Rushkoff says, when everything had narrative structure, even TV ads. Captive audiences sat through commercials that introduced a protagonist, presented a problem, then pitched a product to solve it. The little story ended well, at least from the advertiser's point of view. But now viewers may be more angry than bored at such intrusions. They know that "someone you don't trust is attempting to make you anxious," so they ditch the ad before it's over.

The ancient Greeks learned about the hero's journey from Homer's narratives. We've gotten decades of Homer Simpson, who "remains in a suspended, infinite present," while his audience moves from one satirical pop-culture reference to the next. Citing "Forrest Gump" as a film that failed to combat late-20th-century feelings of discontinuity and "Pulp Fiction" as one wild enough to usher in a new era, Mr. Rushkoff moves on to what came next: the video game open-ended structure that keeps TV drama in the eternal present.

About "Game of Thrones" he says, "This is no longer considered bad writing." Changes to news presentation are even more dramatic. This book describes the present shock of politicians who - thanks to the 24/7 coverage ushered in by "the CNN effect" that began in the 1980s - "cannot get on top of issues, much less get ahead of them." He notes that both the political left (MSNBC, with its slogan "Lean Forward") and right (conservatism devoted to reviving traditional values) share this goal: They're trying to escape the present.

Contrasting the Tea Party with the Occupy movement, he says the Tea Party's apocalyptic yearning for closure is diametrically unlike Occupy's "inspiring and aggravating" quest for an eternal present. The ways Occupy resembles the Internet make him think it may be the more durable of the two movements.

When Mr. Rushkoff moves on to what he calls digiphrenia - digitally provoked mental chaos - he writes about present shock's capacity to be a great leveler. 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? This section of Mr. Rushkoff's agile, versatile book veers into chronobiology, a burgeoning science that has not yet achieved peak popular impact. Dr. Oz may speak of it on television, but the correlation between time and physiology is ripe for more exploration. Mr. Rushkoff, who likes being his own guinea pig, divided his writing of this book into weekly segments based on a lunar cycle.

Among the intuitive ideas turned tangible by "Present Shock" is "filter failure," the writer and teacher Clay Shirky's improved term for what used to be called "information overload." Mr. Rushkoff's translation: "Whatever is vibrating on the iPhone just isn't as valuable as the eye contact you are making right now."

Your new boss isn't the person in the corner office; it's the P.D.A. in your pocket. And there are the discrepancies between age and appearance that are increasingly possible in our malleable present. The book contends that young girls and Botoxed TV "housewives" all want to look 19; that hipsters in their 40s cultivate the affectations of 20-somethings, to the delight of marketers; and that apocalyptic types just want to opt out of time altogether. "Present Shock" gives them good reason to feel that way.

But in the end only some of the ills in "Present Shock" can be chalked up to dehumanizing technological advances. "I am much less concerned with whatever it is technology may be doing to people that what people are choosing to do to one another through technology," Mr. Rushkoff writes. "Facebook's reduction of people to predictively modeled profiles and investment banking's convolution of the marketplace into an algorithmic battleground were not the choices of machines." They were made by human intelligence, because present shock's ways of targeting, pinpointing and manipulating aren't just shocking. They're very lucrative too." (NYT, sent by author)

Excerpts

Under embargo until March 20.