Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now
March 15, 2013
- Author:
- Douglas Rushkoff
- Publisher:
- Current Hardcover (3/21/2013)
This is the moment we’ve been waiting for, explains award-winning media theorist Douglas Rushkoff, but we don’t 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 future’s 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Party and Occupy Wall Street form two sides of the same post-narrative coin; how corporate investing in the future has been replaced by futile efforts to game the stock market in real time; why social networks make people anxious and email can feel like an assault.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.
Kindle version also available at this link
Comments (5)
by Cybernettr
The title sounds intriguing, but the description of this book fails to impress me. It sounds like a takeoff of the 1970 book “Future Shock” and like the one of 40+ years ago, the author overplays the importance of some things and overlooks the significance of others. Occupy Wall Street? Zombie apocalypse fiction? Are those really the defining issues of our time? How about 3D printing and the ramifications it will have for manufacturing in the near future, self-driving cars or the spectre of being able to bring Neanderthals back from the dead? Seems to me the author blew it.
by RB
From your comment, it appears you haven’t read the book. Is your opinion relevant, then, when you say the author “blew it”? Pfft. Everyone’s a critic.
by Bob Vasquez
One just needs to be selective: I Twitter and don’t Facebook. I play classical guitar and don’t go to rock concerts. I’m pretty good at golf but don’t watch football. I buy music theory books and probably won’t buy this one but, I do read Kurzweil on-line.
by lauracrouch8
Good ideas, I will try it out, thanks.
by Ralph Dratman
Live in the present! Buy this book!
But for right here, right now, you will just have to wait in the present to buy this book in the (near!!) future. It is only days away.