If we have no destination toward which we are progressing, then the only thing that motivates our movement is to get away from something threatening. We move from problem to problem, avoiding calamity as best we can, our worldview increasingly characterized by a sense of panic. Our news networks and…
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Douglas Rushkoff
Douglas Rushkoff (born 18 February 1961) is an American media theorist, writer, columnist, lecturer, graphic novelist, and documentarian. He is best known for his association with the early cyberpunk culture, and his advocacy of open source solutions to social problems. Rushkoff is most frequently regarded as a media theorist and is known for coining terms and concepts including viral media (or media virus), digital native, and social currency. He has written ten books on media, technology and culture. He wrote the first syndicated column on cyberculture for The New York Times Syndicate, as well as regular columns for The Guardian of London, Arthur, Discover, and the online magazines Daily Beast, TheFeature.com and meeting industry magazine One+. Rushkoff is currently Professor of Media Theory and Digital Economics at the City University of New York, Queens College. He has previously lectured at The New School University in Manhattan and the ITP at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, where he created the Narrative Lab. He also has taught online for the MaybeLogic Academy. 2Biography 3Background Rushkoff was born in New York City, New York, and is the son of Sheila, a psychiatric social worker, and Marvin Rushkoff, a hospital administrator. He graduated from Princeton University in 198
...children's playground activity has been observed to be paced by just one or two youngsters who move about seemingly randomly from one group to another, establishing fairly precise rhythms of activity. Social scientists believe this collaborative pacing allows for high levels of group coherence as…
The same is true for businesses that rework their operations around the time frames of quarterly reports, and mutual funds that 'dress up' for end-of-year evaluations by selling unpopular assets and purchasing popular ones. They miss or work against the more naturally occurring rhythms and lose the…
By putting email and Twitter in our smart phones and attaching them to our bodies so that something vibrates every time we are mentioned, summoned, or pinged, we turn a potentially empowering asynchronous technology into a falsely synchronous one.
...the bloggers, designers, lovers, and programmers all sacrifice their connection to natural and emergent rhythms and patterns in order to match those dictated by their technologies and the artificial situations they create.
Instead of demanding that our technologies conform to ourselves and our own innate rhythms, we strive to become more compatible with our technologies and the new cultural norms their timelessness implies. We compete to process more emails or attract more social networking connections than our…
Many of us aspire to this ability to be 'on' at any time and to treat the various portions of the day as mere artifacts of a more primitive culture—the way we look at seemingly archaic blue laws that used to require stores to remain closed at least one day a week. We want all the time, to…
Instead of our offloading time-intensive tasks to our machines, our machines keep us humans working at their pace, or the pace of the companies on the other end of our network connections. Thanks to the Internet, we travel more on business, not less, we work at all hours on demand, and we spend our…
The point is that time is not neutral. Hours and minutes are not generic, but specific. We are better at doing some things in the morning and others in the evening. More incredible, those times of day change based on where we are in the twenty-eight-day moon cycle. In one week, we are more…
Although the thing we call time might be a mere concept—variation on energy in Einstein's equations—all this chronobiological evidence suggests there is a kind of synchronization going on between different parts of our world. In other words, even if we are ultimately unhinged from any absolute clock…
...we also have internal clocks, governed by less understood metabolic, hormonal, and glandular processes. We listen to those inner rhythms while simultaneously responding to external cues, from daylight and moon phases to the cycle of the seasons. Still other evidence suggests a complex set of…
Leaving people in rooms with no external time cues, researchers found that the average person's biological clock would actually lengthen to a twenty-five-hour cycle. This, they concluded, is why traveling east, which shortens the day, is so much more disorienting than traveling west, which lengthens…
For [Stewart] Brand, the solution is to expand our awareness of the larger, slower cycles. He is working with inventor Danny Hillis to build a 10,000-year clock—a clock of the 'long now' that changes our orientation to time. His hope is that by beholding this tremendous time-keeping structure in the…
...the survival of a species depends on adaptation and learning on six distinct timescales. On the shortest, most immediate scale, species must exist from year to year. The unit of survival for this year-to-year existence is the individual life form. Over decades, the unit of survival is the family,…
Great ideas don't really come out of sudden eureka moments, but after long, steady slogs through problems. They are slow, iterative processes. Great ideas, as Johnson explained it to a TED audience, 'fade into view over long periods of time.'
Every choice potentially brings us out of immersive participation and into another decision matrix.
Social media lets people feed back their responses immediately and to one another instead of just back to the business or politician concerned. Then other people respond as much to those messages as they do to the product or policy. They are feeding back to one another.
New ideas seem to emerge from a dozen places at once, a mysterious zeitgeist synchronicity until we realize that they are all aspects of the same idea, emerging from a single network of minds.
Nature is patterned, which is part of what makes a walk in the woods feel reassuring. The shapes of the branches are reflected in the veins of the leaves and the patterns of the paths between the trunks. The repeating patterns in fractals also seem to convey a logic or at least a pattern underlying…
What makes fractals so interesting is that they are self-similar. If you zoom in on a shape in the pattern and look at the image at a much higher scale, you find that very same shape reappearing in the details on this new level. Zoom in again and the patterns emerge again.