Friday, June 28, 2013

Present Shock

Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now by Douglas Rushkoff is sort of like Keen's Digital Vertigo, but a bit less disjointed. Rushkoff describes what he calls a "presentist" culture where everything is about the now. We have confused "flow" with "storage", kairos time with chronos time, and our current anemic state is the failure to reconcile two fundamentally different levels of identity: digital, where we are spending most of our (mental) time, and analog, where we still live and must return to inevitably. We are addicted to possibility and stimulation as the digital realm provides it for us. Also, Rushkoff's media ecologist tendencies sporadically flare up.

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