Synopses & Reviews
If the end of the twentieth century can be characterized by futurism, the twenty-first can be defined by presentism.”
This is the moment weve been waiting for, explains award-winning media theorist Douglas Rushkoff, but we dont seem to have any time in which to live it. Instead we remain poised and frozen, overwhelmed by an always-on, live-streamed reality that our human bodies and minds can never truly inhabit. And our failure to do so has had wide-ranging effects on every aspect of our lives.
People spent the twentieth century obsessed with the future. We created technologies that would help connect us faster, gather news, map the planet, compile knowledge, and connect with anyone, at anytime. We strove for an instantaneous network where time and space could be compressed.
Well, the futures arrived. We live in a continuous now enabled by Twitter, email, and a so-called real-time technological shift. Yet this now” is an elusive goal that we can never quite reach. And the dissonance between our digital selves and our analog bodies has thrown us into a new state of anxiety: present shock.
Rushkoff weaves together seemingly disparate events and trends into a rich, nuanced portrait of how life in the eternal present has affected our biology, behavior, politics, and culture. He explains how the rise of zombie apocalypse fiction signals our intense desire for an ending; how the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street form two sides of the same post-narrative coin; how corporate investing in the future has been replaced by futile efforts to game the stock market in real time; why social networks make people anxious and email can feel like an assault. He examines how the tragedy of 9/11 disconnected an entire generation from a sense of history, and delves into why conspiracy theories actually comfort us.
As both individuals and communities, we have a choice. We can struggle through the onslaught of information and play an eternal game of catch-up. Or we can choose to live in the present: favor eye contact over texting; quality over speed; and human quirks over digital perfection. Rushkoff offers hope for anyone seeking to transcend the false now.
Absorbing and thought-provoking, Present Shock is a wide-ranging, deeply thought meditation on what it means to be human in real time.
Review
“This is a wondrously thought-provoking book. Unlike other social theorists who either mindlessly decry or celebrate the digital age, Rushkof f explores how it has caused a focus on the immediate moment that can be both disorienting and energizing.”
—Walter Isaacson, author of Steve Jobs
“Rushkoff gives readers a healthy dose of perspective, insight, and critical analysis thats sure to get minds spinning and tongues wagging.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“In this refreshing antidote to promises of digital Utopia, Rushkoff articulates his own well-informed second thoughts. We should pay close attention—while we still can.”
—George Dyson, author of Turings Cathedral and Darwin Among the Machines
“If you read one book next year to help you make sense of the present moment, let it be Present Shock.”
—Anthony Wing Kosner, Forbes.com
“Present Shock holds up new lenses and offers new narratives about what might be happening to us and why, compelling readers to look at the larger repercussions of todays technologically mediated social practices, from texting to checking in with a location-based service, jet-lag to The Simpsons, in new ways.”
—Howard Rheingold, author of Net Smart
“A wide-ranging social and cultural critique, Present Shock artfully weaves through many different materials as it makes its point: we are exhilarated, drugged, and consumed by the now. But we need to attend to the future before us and embrace the present in a more constructive way.”
—Sherry Turkle, author of Alone Together
“With brilliant insight Rushkoff once again gets there early, making us confront the new world of ‘presentism—the shif t in our focus from the future to the present, from the horizon-gazing to the experience of here and now. He points to signs of presentism all around us—in how we conduct politics, interact with media, and negotiate relationships.”
—Marina Gorbis, executive director, Institute for the Future
Review
"
The End of Absence is a genial and philosophical tour through one mans anxieties surrounding digital life.”
—The New York Times
"Harris has caught, with brilliant fidelity and incisiveness, a hinge-point in modern history: Before and After the Digital Rapture. The End of Absence deserves a place alongside Neil Postmans Amusing Ourselves to Death and Sherry Turkles Life on the Screen. A great, important (and fun) read. I couldnt in good conscience lend out my copy: every other page is dog-eared."
—Bruce Grierson, author of What Makes Olga Run?
“This is a lovely, direct, and beautifully written book that will make you feel good about living in the times we do. Michael Harris is honest in a way I find increasingly rare: clear, truthful, and free of vexation. A true must-read.”
—Douglas Coupland, author of Worst. Person. Ever. and Generation X
“The End of Absence is a beautifully written and surprisingly rousing book. Michael Harris scans the flotsam of our everyday, tech-addled lives and pulls it all together to create a convincing new way to talk about our relationship with the Internet. He has taken the vague technological anxiety we all live with and shaped it into a bold call for action.”
—Steven Galloway, author of The Confabulist and The Cellist of Sarajevo
“Everybody over sixty should read this book. The rest of the population will need no urging, unless they are too far gone to read anything longer than a blurb. The first part reads like a horror story, a shocking mind-thriller. In the second half the author, despite real foreboding, demonstrates in his own person that all is far from lost. Relief, after much learning.”
—Margaret Visser, author of Much Depends on Dinner
“In this thoughtful, well-written book, Michael Harris combines personal narrative with the views of experts to show us that the digital revolution that envelops us contains traps that can lead us to understand less even as we seem to know more.”
—Barry Schwartz, author of The Paradox of Choice and Practical Wisdom
Synopsis
Noted media pundit Douglas Rushkoff gives a devastating critique of the influence techniques behind our culture of rampant consumerism. With a skilled analysis of how experts in the fields of marketing, advertising, retail atmospherics, and hand-selling attempt to take away our ability to make rational decisions, Rushkoff delivers a bracing account of why we buy what we buy, and helps us recognize when we're being treated like consumers instead of human beings.
Synopsis
"A darkly comic contemporary fable: a brave, very funny, very knowing trip through the neo-psychedelic substrate of the wired world." --
William Gibson, bestselling author of
Neuromancer and
Idoru Douglas Rushkoff--the foremost authority on cyberculture and author of Cyberia, Media Virus and Playing the Future--has penned the ultimate novel for our fast and furious times. A wired-in thrill ride into the here and now of tripping, raving, net-surfing...and beyond.
"An eerie tale of 20-somethings caught up in an increasingly trippy world of homegrown religion. Set in an abandoned piano factory in Oakland, CA., Rushkoff's novel drops several characters--hackster, hipster, hustler, hippie--into a pop-culture Cuisinart along with a nice Jewish boy, and then spins them off into an intricate plot that leads to a showdown with the leader of a rival cultlike group." --New York Times
Synopsis
An award-winning author explores how the world works in our age of “continuous now” Back in the 1970s, futurism was all the rage. But looking forward is becoming a thing of the past. According to Douglas Rushkoff, “presentism” is the new ethos of a society that’s always on, in real time, updating live. Guided by neither history nor long term goals, we navigate a sea of media that blend the past and future into a mash-up of instantaneous experience. Rushkoff shows how this trend is both disorienting and exhilarating. Without linear narrative we get both the humiliations of reality TV and the associative brilliance of The Simpsons. With no time for long term investing, we invent dangerously compressed derivatives yet also revive sustainable local businesses. In politics, presentism drives both the Tea Party and the Occupy movement. In many ways, this was the goal of digital technology—outsourcing our memory was supposed to free us up to focus on the present. But we are in danger of squandering this cognitive surplus on trivia. Rushkoff shows how we can instead ground ourselves in the reality of the present tense.
Synopsis
"A darkly comic contemporary fable: a brave, very funny, very knowing trip through the neo-psychedelic substrate of the wired world." --
William Gibson, bestselling author of
Neuromancer and
Idoru Douglas Rushkoff--the foremost authority on cyberculture and author of Cyberia, Media Virus and Playing the Future--has penned the ultimate novel for our fast and furious times. A wired-in thrill ride into the here and now of tripping, raving, net-surfing...and beyond.
"An eerie tale of 20-somethings caught up in an increasingly trippy world of homegrown religion. Set in an abandoned piano factory in Oakland, CA., Rushkoff's novel drops several characters--hackster, hipster, hustler, hippie--into a pop-culture Cuisinart along with a nice Jewish boy, and then spins them off into an intricate plot that leads to a showdown with the leader of a rival cultlike group." --New York Times
Synopsis
People spent the twentieth century obsessed with the future. We created technologies that would help connect us faster, gather news, map the planet, and compile knowledge. We strove for an instantaneous network where time and space could be compressed.
Well, the futures arrived. We live in a continuous now enabled by Twitter, email, and a so-called real-time technological shift. Yet this now” is an elusive goal that we can never quite reach. And the dissonance between our digital selves and our analog bodies has thrown us into a new state of anxiety: present shock.
Douglas Rushko weaves together seemingly disparate events and trends into a rich, nuanced portrait of how life in the eternal present has affected our biology, behavior, politics, and culture.
Invaluable.” The New York Times
This is a wondrously thought-provoking book.” Walter Isaacson
A sobering wake-up call to collectively reexamine our relationship with time before were blindsided by an unwelcome future.” Booklist
Synopsis
A futurists in-depth look at the promise and perils of forecasting An app on your phone knows youre getting married before you do. Your friends tweets can help data scientists predict your location with astounding accuracy, even if you dont use Twitter. Soon, well be able to know how many kids in a kindergarten class will catch a cold once the first one gets sick.
We are on the threshold of a historic transition in our ability to predict aspects of the future with ever-increasing precision. Computer-aided forecasting is poised for rapid growth over the next ten years. The rise of big data will enable us to predict not only events like earthquakes or epidemics, but also individual behavior.
Patrick Tucker explores the potential for abuse of predictive analytics as well as the benefits. Will we be able to predict guilt before a person commits a crime? Is it legal to quarantine someone 99 percent likely to have the superflu while theyre still healthy? These questions matter, because the naked future will be upon us sooner than we realize.
Synopsis
When online experiences dominate our lives, what gets lost?
Only one generation in history (ours) will experience life both with and without the Internet. For everyone who follows us, online life will simply be the air they breathe. Today, we revel in ubiquitous information and constant connection, rarely stopping to consider the implications for our logged-on lives. Michael Harris chronicles this massive shift, exploring what weve gainedand lostin the bargain.
In this eloquent and thought-provoking book, Harris argues that our greatest loss has been that of absence itselfof silence, wonder, and solitude. Its a surprisingly precious commodity, and one we have less of every year.
Drawing on a vast trove of research and scores of interviews with global experts, Harris explores this loss of lack” in chapters devoted to every corner of our lives, from sex and commerce to memory and attention span. The books message is urgent: once weve lost the gift of absence, we may never remember its value.
Synopsis
"Every revolution in communication technologyfrom papyrus to the printing press to Twitteris as much an opportunity to be drawn away from something as it is to be drawn toward something. And yet, as we embrace technology's gifts, we usually fail to consider what we're giving up in the process. Why would we bother to register the end of solitude, of ignorance, of lack? Why would we care that an absence had disappeared?"
Soon enough, nobody will remember life before the Internet. What does this unavoidable fact mean?
For future generations, it wont mean anything very obvious. They will be so immersed in online life that questions about the Internets basic purpose or meaning will vanish.
But those of us who have lived both with and without the crowded connectivity of online life have a rare opportunity. We can still recognize the difference between Before and After. We catch ourselves idly reaching for our phones at the bus stop. Or we notice how, mid-conversation, a fumbling friend dives into the perfect recall of Google.
In this eloquent and thought-provoking book, Michael Harris argues that amid all the changes were experiencing, the most interesting is the one that future generations will find hardest to grasp. That is the end of absencethe loss of lack. The daydreaming silences in our lives are filled; the burning solitudes are extinguished. Theres no true free time” when you carry a smartphone. Todays rarest commodity is the chance to be alone with your own thoughts.
To understand our predicament, and what we should do about it, Harris explores this loss of lack” in chapters devoted to every corner of our lives, from sex and commerce to memory and attention span. His book is a kind of witness for the straddle generation”a burst of empathy for those of us who suspect that our technologies use us as much as we use them.
By placing our situation in a rich historical context, Harris helps us remember which parts of that earlier world we dont want to lose forever. He urges us to look upeven brieflyfrom our screens. To remain awake to what came before. To again take pleasure in absence.
Synopsis
People spent the twentieth century obsessed with the future. We created technologies that would help connect us faster, gather news, map the planet, and compile knowledge. We strove for an instantaneous network where time and space could be compressed.
Well, the futures arrived. We live in a continuous now enabled by Twitter, email, and a so-called real-time technological shift. Yet this now” is an elusive goal that we can never quite reach. And the dissonance between our digital selves and our analog bodies has thrown us into a new state of anxiety: present shock.
Douglas Rushko weaves together seemingly disparate events and trends into a rich, nuanced portrait of how life in the eternal present has affected our biology, behavior, politics, and culture.
Invaluable.” The New York Times
This is a wondrously thought-provoking book.” Walter Isaacson
A sobering wake-up call to collectively reexamine our relationship with time before were blindsided by an unwelcome future.” Booklist
About the Author
Douglas Ruskoff's previous books--including
Cyberia and
Media Virus--have been translated into thirteen languages. He is the Technology and Culture Consultant to the United Nations Commission on World Culture and a regular consultant to Fortune 500 companies, and he writes a bi-weekly column for the New York Times syndicate. He teaches at the Esalen Institute and Banff Center for the Arts, and will be adjunct professor of Media Sociology at New York University in 1999. He lives in New York City.
Douglas Rushkoff is currently featured on ZDTV's "Big Thinkers" series. Check out the site at www.zdtv.com/bigthinkers.
Table of Contents
Introduction: They Say
Chapter One: Hand-to-Hand
Chapter Two: Atmospherics
Chapter Three: Spectacle
Chapter Four: Public Relations
Chapter Five: Advertising
Chapter Six: Pyramids
Chapter Seven: Virtual Marketing
Postscript: Buyer's Remorse
Bibliography
Notes
Index