Douglas Rushkoff

Douglas Rushkoff: Our On-Line Interactions Occur on Platforms Whose Function Is To Exploit Them

by Socrates
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Douglas Rushkoff is one of my favorite social ctitics on media, technology, culture and money. In this interview with Motherboard TV Rushkoff talks about technology, social media, the zombie apocalypse and the occupy movement. My favorite quote from Rushkoff’s interview: “Our interactions on line occur on platforms whose function, whose purpose is not to promote our social interaction, but to exploit our social interaction. So you have the average kid using Facebook believes that he is the customer of Facebook and that Facebook is there to help him make friends. And it’s not. The corporation is paying Facebook for Johny’s social graph. To reduce human interraction to that which is marketable to Facebook’s customers. Now, you are inhabiting a comercial environement that was constructed by people and companies in order to promote certain behaviors and attitudes from you. We have an entire way of life that is predicated on a faulty [...]

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Douglas Rushkoff on Singularity Podcast

by Socrates
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Today I have Douglas Rushkoff as my guest at Singularity Podcast and we discuss a variety of topics such as his most recent book Program or Be Programmed, the impact of modern media and social networking, technology in general and the technological singularity in particular. Who is Douglas Rushkoff? Douglas 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 teaches media studies at New York University, serves as technology columnist for The Daily Beast, and lectures around the world. Rushkoff’s new book, Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age, is a followup to his Frontline documentary Digital Nation. His previous book was called Life Inc. was also made into a short, award-winning film. Douglas has ten best-selling books on new media and [...]

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Douglas Rushkoff: Program or Be Programmed

by Socrates
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In a recent blog post I asked: Does Technology Make Us Smart or Stupid? At least part of my motivation for asking the question was a result of watching a thought provoking must-see PBS Frontline documentary by Douglas Rushkoff called Digital Nation, which examined many of the pros and cons of the internet and modern technology. In the video below Douglas Rushkoff goes a step further and argues that within the current technological paradigm one either programs or is being programmed. While Rushkoff’s argument and its implications are much broader in scope and more sophisticated in meaning than merely referring to computer code, it reminds me strongly of the classic cult sci fi movie Tron. In Tron there are “programs” and “users.” Since the users wrote (i.e. programmed) the code for the programs, in Tron the users are Gods. The [...]

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