"Program or be Programmed" by Douglas Rushkoff - Major Studio 2
"In the long term, if we take up this challenge [of programming], we are looking at nothing less than the conscious, collective intervention of human beings in their own evolution. It’s the opportunity of a civilization’s lifetime. Shouldn’t more of us want to participate actively in this project?" Douglas Rushkoff has managed to articulate my own thoughts on the state of our networked world and has managed to metabolize several thinkers on the topic in an amazingly succinct way (Lanier, Postman etc). I found myself nodding in agreement most of the way through this short and sweet book. Writing ABOUT this book is challenging because Rushkoff's ideas are so dead-on that I'm in danger of simply quoting the entire book.
In the discussion in class someone, probably Dave Carroll, said that being critical about AND with technology is our main duty. I agree, and have agreed for years before I knew I agreed. Working in a corporate software and hardware technology environment for the last 6 year I was surrounded by people jumping into apps, analyzing and bitching about software update this or that. I was never fully engaged in those conversations as I had the distinct feeling that we didn't have the right to complain. That if we were so smart and wanted these magical toys to work the way we wanted them to we should be more involved. But I didn't know how easy that could be.
Then there is the anxiety. The knowledge that we constantly could and should be doing new and different things, wrapping up email conversations, posting new stuff, feeding the insatiable time suck of web correspondence. To paraphrase Rushkoff's first chapter on time: an anxiety sinks in because the computers are waiting for me to do something, we are never NOT connected.
My particular generation are strange middle children in all this change. I wrote some papers in school by hand, some were researched entirely online, all within two or three years of still being in grade school. I asked out a first date on IM, yet I refused to get a mySpace page until it majorly jumped the shark. Perhaps it is this broad scope of experience that has let me see two things clearly: I am more than my "likes" and I am responsible for everything I say and do in every sphere of public life, including the web. Identity is important on the web because there are social constraints that are more likely to be followed when people can connect an identity to the person saying things. But even I have been slow to reveal my real name, and things like spokeo.com are not helping to push me forward in that realm. Not because I am ashamed of what I do and say but because there are other people writing the rules about what can be done with that information. Which leads me to conclude that learning how to control these powerful tools is the most important thing I could learn, and I have known that for a long time but it took reading Rushkoff's book to articulate it. We have to grab our own destiny and not fall one step behind every great media innovation. If we do that, things like PIPA and SOPA would never be proposed because those with the power to do so would have no doubt that a rule so blunt and stupid would never work on us programmers. Perhaps they wouldn't even be the ones in power but we, the programmers, would.