“Every choice potentially brings us out of immersive participation and into another decision matrix.”— Douglas Rushkoff, amazon.comTagged: Notes to self, Present Shock
“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.”— Douglas Rushkoff, amazon.comTagged: Facts, Notes to, Notes to self, Present Shock
“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.”— Douglas Rushkoff, amazon.comTagged: Notes to self, Present Shock
“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…”— Douglas Rushkoff, amazon.comTagged: Facts, Fractals, Notes to self, Present Shock
“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.”— Douglas Rushkoff, amazon.comTagged: Facts, Fractals, Notes to self, Present Shock
“Once 'the shadow of the future' lengthens, we have the basis for more durable relationships.”— Robert Axelrod, amazon.comTagged: Management, Notes to self, Present Shock
“Management's job is not to fill current employees with the collected, compressed wisdom of the ages, but rather to support them in the jobs only they are actually charged with doing. Management becomes a bit like customer service department for the employees, who are the ones responsible for the bus…”— Douglas Rushkoff, amazon.comTagged: Management, Notes to self, Present Shock
“When a bank wants to move a big quantity of shares, for example, it doesn't want everyone to know what it is doing. If news of a big buy leaked out before the big buy could be completed, the price may go up. To hide their motions, they employ the same technique as stealth planes: they use algorithms…”— Douglas Rushkoff, amazon.comTagged: Facts, Notes to self, Present Shock
“Our iPads and Androids are nothing like the productivity-computing tools on which they may once have been based but are instead purchasing platforms designed to increase the ease and speed with which we consume.”— Douglas Rushkoff, amazon.comTagged: Digital media, Notes to self, Present Shock
“But the initial choice to have email at all is to open a loop. The choice to open a particular email, though, constitutes entry into something more like static information. The problem is that the sender may have spring-loaded a whole lot of time and energy into that message, so that clicking on it…”— Douglas Rushkoff, amazon.comTagged: Email, Notes to self, Present Shock, Work
“Flowing information, like twenty-four-hour news or MTV videos, is more like the nonnarrative experience of electronic music or extreme sports. We get a textural experience, we learn the weather, or we catch the drift. We do not get to the end; we shut it off and it continues without us.”— Douglas Rushkoff, amazon.comTagged: Digital media, Notes to self, Present Shock
“Catching up with Twitter is like staying up all night to catch up on live streaming stock quotes from yesterday.”— Douglas Rushkoff, amazon.comTagged: Digital media, Notes to self, Present Shock, Twitter
“CNN was not under traditional corporate control, so it could present news without worrying about who or what was impacted; its always-on format meant the newsroom was not under the obligation to craft events into satisfying packages for a single evening broadcast; its position on the cable dial lowe…”— Douglas Rushkoff, amazon.comTagged: Media, Saddam Hussein, CNN, Media Companies
“Why is this so hard for so many of us? It's not because we need the email for our productivity, but because we are addicted to the possibility that there's a great tidbit in there somewhere. Like compulsive gamblers at a slot machine rewarded with a few quarters every dozen tries, we are trained to…”— Douglas Rushkoff, amazon.comTagged: Emai, Email, Time Managment
“Like generals in the safety of a situation room using toy tanks on a miniature battlefield to re-create a noisy and violent war, government and corporate leaders strategized in isolation from the cacophony of feedback. They sought to engage with their challenges from far above and to make moves as i…”— Douglas Rushkoff, amazon.comTagged: Complexity, Detachment
“In a networked ideascape, the ownership of an idea becomes as quaint and indefensible a notion as copyright or patents. Since ideas are built on the logic of others, there is no way to trace their independent origins. It’s all just access to the shared consciousness. Everything is everything. Accept…”— Douglas Rushkoff, amazon.comTagged: Consciousness, Copyright
“How many generations before our own asked people to earn and save enough money while young in order to accumulate a nest egg big enough to live off for the last third of one’s life? It’s a bit like asking an animal to get fat enough not to have to eat again for the rest of its natural life.”— Douglas Rushkoff, amazon.com
“It calls to mind the questions posed back in the 1960s by Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram, who had been fascinated by the impact of spectacle and authority on soldiers’ obedience in Nazi Germany. Milgram wanted to know if German war criminals could have been following orders, as they claimed, and…”— Douglas Rushkoff, amazon.comTagged: Media, Reality TV