“We tend to exist in a a distracted present where forces on the periphery are magnified and those immediately before us are ignored.”
That’s from Douglas Rushkoff’s 2013 book Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now.
Rushkoff is a media theorist and professor who is credited with the term “viral media.” In the early 2010s, as social media and digital tools were in the ascent, he put forward his “present shock,” as a kind of response to the 1970s concept of “future shock.”
Toffler’s “future shock” was the stress and disorientation caused by too much rapid change arriving from the future, while Rushkoff’s “present shock” is the stress and disorientation caused by an always-on, real-time culture that collapses time into a perpetual now.
New technologies can reduce the time and energy we spend on less complex tasks. As Rushkoff writes: “We are also in danger of squandering this cognitive surplus in the trivial pursuit of the immediately relevant.”
Below I share my notes for future references.
My notes:
- Alvin Toffler’s 1970 book “Future Shock”
- “We tend to exist in a a distracted present where forces on the periphery are magnified and those immediately before us are ignored”
- Vanavar Bush and J.C.R. Licklider: After WW2 horrors, machines to remember for us will save us from “the tyranny of the past” by freeing up the present of “the burden of memory”
- “We are also in danger of squandering this cognitive surplus in the trivial pursuit of the immediately relevant.”
- The moment something is realized, it is over (like being on Time magazine cover)
- Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth is a famous 1988 PBS series featuring six hours of interviews between mythologist Joseph Campbell and journalist Bill Moyers
- Mark Turner: “Narrative imagining—story—is the fundamental instrument of thought.”
- Writes about how remote control meant advertising and story had to be more pleasurable and shorter — but this was before rise of prestige drama
- Aristotle: “When the storytelling in a culture goes bad the result is decadence”
- Beavis and Butthead and Mystery Science Theater as introducing second screen, satire and podcast style shared consumption
- “This is why the network came under such widespread attack in its earlier days from traditional news media, academics, and politicians. Contrary to journalistic standards of the day, CNN let Saddam Hussein speak directly to the American people. During Operation Desert Storm in 1991, CNN was the only network to broadcast the first bombardments of Baghdad from a hotel window, having made arrangements for transmission access with the Iraqi government that were later criticized. CNN also carried immediate and around-the-clock coverage of the Battle of Mogadishu, the protests at Tiananmen Square and the fall of communism in Eastern Europe. This saturation with live, uncensored, and unconsidered images from around the world impacted public opinion profoundly and actually forced government leaders to make decisions more quickly. Officials at the Pentagon eventually dubbed this phenomenon “the CNN effect”
- WW1 and 2 had public opinion orchestrated, no such luck for military leaders in Vietnam
- Andrew Keen’s 2007 book “The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture”: according to a June 2006 study by the Pew Internet in American Life Project, 34% of the 12 million bloggers in America consider their online work to be a form of journalism. That adds up to millions of unskilled, untrained, unpaid, unknown journalists – 1000 fold growth between 1996 and 2006 – spewing their (mis)information out in the cyber world”
- At time of publishing, Jeff Jarvis was optimistic then that the market would allow better information to rise to the top of pile