Tag: Media Theory

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The Austin Chronicle: “The World is Your Cubicle,” featuring Me

For Nora Ankrum’s recent roundup of SXSW Interactive panels and talks having to do with distance working, “The World is Your Cubicle,” she interviewed me about my SXSWi talk Disconnecting the Dots: How Our Devices are Divisive and my book-in-progress, The Medium Picture.

Here’s the excerpt that features me running my mouth:

“Having a beer with someone is still one of the most connecting things you can do,” agrees Roy Christopher, a communication studies doctoral student at the University of Texas at Austin. Still, he says, “the nature of being human is having technology.” Christopher is currently writing a book about human relationships with technology, which he’ll discuss in his panel, Disconnecting the Dots: How Our Devices Are Divisive. “Every new technology falls on a continuum between obstruction and augmentation,” he says, and as such it poses unexpected paradoxes. For instance, “Everyone says ‘location doesn’t matter’ – but it makes location all the more important because you can choose to be anywhere.”

Admittedly, that last insight is not mine. Nicholas Negroponte pointed that out in his book Being Digital (Vintage, 1996). I’ll claim at least the synthesis of the rest though. I’m anxious to talk about this stuff at SXSW Interactive and in the new book.

Many, many thanks to Nora Ankrum and The Austin Chronicle for their time and attention.

 

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Thinking Odd: Learning from the Future

I mentioned earlier that it’s often difficult for adults to trust the youth, but that it’s imperative. Letting youthful vision lead is the only way into the future. Well, Tyler the Creator and his Odd Future crew aren’t waiting for permission, approval, or funding — much less trust — from anyone. They are doing it, and doing it big.

Everyone can stop mongering the minutia of Radiohead’s every move. Though they’ve done nothing but smart things since parting ways with the past, they were already famous in three solar systems when they stepped out on that limb. Clamoring to find what one can learn from their marketing strategies is like trying to climb the stairs to catch the elevator: They’re already there. Odd Future is showing everyone how it’s ground up from the ground up. I’m not going to pretend that I can distill what they’re doing into a simple myth-making and marketing how-to, but I would like to point out a few key things. Some of you will find parts of this redundant, but Odd Future offers an excellent case study in getting out there in the now.

“Go make the art you believe in.” — El-P

For the uninitiated, OFWGKTA (Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All) are a Hip-hop collective out of Los Angeles. The oldest of their ten members are barely out of high school and the youngest are barely in. They have been making waves for the past year or so releasing as many records as they have members — for free — on their website, posting YouTube clips of both of their hoodrat antics and music videos for their songs. The aesthetic is somewhere between Wu-Tang Clan and Anticon, but way more dangerous and unpredictable (any one of them would slice me for those comparisons). The music is amazing, the skills are off the crazy, and their fanbase is huge, growing, and includes Mos Def, Despot, Skyzoo, and Jimmy Fallon, the latter of whom had them perform on his show recently. These kids prove that there is nothing so cool as youthful nihilism.

So, how do ten teens from L.A. build such a following? Here are six things Odd Future does right. This is how the music industry works now.

Release your darlings. Straight up, music wants to be free. It’s not a maybe. It is what your audience expects. Couldn’t you be selling yourself short (so to speak) by giving your work away? How so? Have you seen record-sales numbers lately? Odd Future has given away every record they’ve made thus far. They’re all on their website. Go ahead. Go get them.

Consider the vehicle. Does your idea fit in a tweet? Is it better as a post on your website? YouTube video? Song? Record? Painting? Poem? Find the vehicle that will best let the idea find its audience. Odd Future posts YouTube videos and new songs on the regular, often as soon as they’re recorded. Their cult of personality has largely been built three minutes at a time.

A lot of those videos are just the various Odd Future/Wolf Gang members skateboarding, graffiti writing, and goofing off, but here’s Tyler the Creator’s latest clip for “Yonkers” off of his forthcoming record Goblin [runtime: 3:05]. Take notes, kids. This is how it’s done.

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“Playing it safe isn’t interesting” — Ryan Kidwell

Risk it not once in a while, but every time. If you just watched that video, you know that it took a lot of courage or a touch of insanity — or a bit of both — as well as a truckload of raw talent (If you didn’t watch it, you should probably do so.). When “anyone” can do this, the just noticeable difference can make all the difference in the world. Tyler took what could’ve been another weird rap video and instead made a visual, artistic statement. That isn’t easy. You have to risk a part of yourself to get anything out of anything. Put it out there, and don’t feel forced to explain it. Mystery loves company.

Find a foil. I suggested before that one should start by having heroes as foils would likely come, but Odd Future show that having a common enemy (or three: Steve Harvey, NahRight, and 2DopeBoyz) can unite your crew. They also don’t really look up to many folks. Their whole take is about putting the tools to work in a “fuck it” kind of way. They don’t want or need your guidance. Sometimes we could all use a good shove to the next level, no matter if we feel ready. Finding someone else’s work to counteract can be just the push you need.

“You really can’t wait for anybody, and if things start fucking up and slowing down, you have to do it yourself and you have to make your own noise.” — Apathy

Do it yourself. You can’t wait around for someone else to make your thing happen. Using the establishment when possible is okay as a supplement, but your own efforts are your best resource. Make them count. OFWGKTA don’t even have parents, much less managers, publishers, or label contracts. As their website says about “Yonkers” (above): “Song Produced And Video Directed By The Nigga Thats Rapping.”

“Do what you feel, and feel what you do.” — J-Live

Love it. When you find what you think you want to do, make sure you love doing it. If you don’t, find something else. People often say that great art comes from pain, but I think that sentiment is misguided. I think that everyone should love it or leave it alone.

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Here are Tyler the Creator and Hodgy Beats on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon from February 16, 2011 [runtime: 3:57]. Tell me they’re not having fun. When they announced this appearance on their site, they added “Time To Scare White America.” Mission accomplished:

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Now, go do something bigger than you had planned.

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Yoxi Live Twitter Interview

The good folks over at Yoxi decided to interview me live on Twitter today mostly about my upcoming SXSW Interactive talk. Below is a transcription of the chat. I’ve edited it for chronology, continuity, and obvious text limitations, but overall it’s just as it appeared live.

Yoxi: Excited to have you as our 4th guest for #yoxichat. We’re stoked about your #SXSW panel!

Roy Christopher: Thank you! Glad to be here. I’m stoked on the #SXSW talk, too. Should be a hoot.

Y: Definitely! Speaking of #SXSW, what inspired your panel, Disconnecting the Dots: How Our Devices Are Divisive?

RC: In the midst of a book about technological mediation, I proposed this talk to #SXSW to work through some of those issues.

Y: Technological mediation, interesting! Tell us more about your research in that area!

RC: The book and talk are about all the ways we mediate our relationships with each other, our world, etc. through technology. Trying to develop a theory of technology that can account for new and old mediation alike.

Y: That’s great and truly relevant. Tech continues to consume our everyday lives.

RC: I’ve been exploring the land between thees lines for years, trying to assess it from the broadest possible perspective.

Y: If our “devices are divisive,” how do we find a balance in our digital lives?

RC: The same way we keep up with our lawns: sometimes we do, sometimes we don’t. Technology is a part of our nature.

Y: Very true but if tech is part of our nature, how do we find a balance? Do you think people should just disconnect?

RC: Meta-attention is key: Assessing what one pays attention to and adjusting accordingly. Disconnection is not the answer.

Y: In terms of solutions, what advice do you have for teams in Yoxi’s Competition #2: Balance Your Digital Diet?

RC: I think “balance” is the wrong word. It’s more of a “tension,” and I think backing up and assessing it is the first step. Meta-attention and metacognition are not as widespread phenomena as they need to be. This is not elitism; it’s literacy.

Y: Thanks so much for joining us. Great thoughts. Hope everyone will check out your #SXSW panel. See you in Austin!

RC: Thank you for the time and attention. I appreciate it. See you in Austin in March!

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Many thanks to Arielle and Randy at Yoxi for their interest and for setting this up.

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Distant Early Warning: Coupland on McLuhan

If I had to pick a patron saint, a hero, or a single intellectual influence for my adult self, it would undoubtedly be Marshall McLuhan. If you’ve spent any time at all reading my work, you’ve seen his name and his ideas. Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work! (Atlas & Co., 2010) is the latest biography of the man and differs from previous versions in many ways, not the least of which is the author. Having struggled through several of Douglas Coupland’s novels, I had my reservations about his writing this book. I am glad to say he eloquently quelled most of my concerns.

The world weighs on my shoulders
But what am I to do?
You sometimes drive me crazy
But I worry about you — Rush, “Distant Early Warning”

There are several things that people often overlook or misunderstand about McLuhan that Coupland nailed in this book. One was his devout Catholic faith, which rooted his thinking in many ways once he found it, and another was his deep disdain of the media and its attendant technology. In spite of his insight, foresight, and prescience, he hated this stuff. Coupland points out many times that McLuhan wouldn’t have liked our current reliance on technology and connectivity one bit, but he would’ve found it interesting. Another of Coupland’s key insights is that, above all else, McLuhan was an artist, “one who happened to use ideas and words as others might use paint” (p. 16). Seen in this way, a lot of his work might make a hell of a lot more sense to newbies, critics, and haters alike. Like the best artists, he was a pattern perceiver of the highest order.

There’s really no considering this book, its author, or its subject without considering Canada. Yes, Canada, The Great White Wasteland that brought us Rush, hockey, Bob and Doug McKenzie, Justin Bieber, Coupland and McLuhan, as well as the latter’s most obvious forebear, Harold Innis. It’s cold up there, folks — cold and spread out. It makes one appreciate the human element.

“Call it religion or call it optimism,” Coupland writes, “but hope, for Marshall, lay in the fact that humans are social creatures first, and that our ability to express intelligence and build civilizations stems from our inherent social needs as individuals” (p. 165). Or, as McLuhan himself put it, “The user is the content” (Take that, so-called “social media experts”). McLuhan’s consistent focus on the individual is what has kept his ideas fresh in the face of new contrivances.

I know it makes no difference
To what you’re going through
But I see the tip of the iceberg
And I worry about you — Rush, “Distant Early Warning”

My problem with Coupland’s past work has had less to do with his writing ability (he’s an excellent writer) and more to do with his appropriation of Salingerisms, and not even a biography could escape. Coupland alludes to Catcher in the Rye by comparing McLuhan to Holden Caulfield on page 111. It’s an apt comparison, and it characterizes The Mechanical Bride-era McLuhan accurately, but I have to admit being irked at the reference.

With all of that said, You Know Nothing of My Work made me proud (I fancy myself something of a McLuhan scholar, so this is meant as a heartfelt compliment), and it made me cry (Though I already knew the story of McLuhan’s last days, a word-man unable to use words is still one of the saddest things I can imagine). I’d like to think Marshall McLuhan would’ve liked this book. It’s treats him with respect, humility, and humor, and I think it “gets” him. What else could he want from a biography?

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Here is a scene that illustrates the heights of McLuhan’s fame, what Coupland calls “every geek’s dream,” and this book’s namesake: Marshall Mcluhan in Woddy Allen’s Annie Hall (1977) [runtime: 2:43]:

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Geekend Notes by Raise Small Business Marketing

Hilton Head, South Carolina’s own Raise Small Business Marketing did a brief summary and write-up of my “How to Do Stuff and Be Happy” talk from Geekend 2010. Here’s the run-down:

I was excited for this session, mainly because doing stuff and being happy are two major challenges!  Roy Christopher gave a laid back presentation that basically went through some ideas on how to keep your focus and try and stay happy while actually getting things done.

Roy covers a lot of the information that was in his presentation on his own blog right here so we won’t go over all of that however some of the things we really took away from the session:

  1. Roy was a competitive Rubik’s Cube Player (established geek cred for sure!)
  2. Find people who have done what you want to do and emulate them
  3. Feed and water your mentors- let people know you respect them and why
  4. Save your own story
  5. Keep a journal
  6. Keep a promise file
  7. Get organized
  8. Trust your curiosity

You can read the post here.

Many thanks to the folks at Raise and Geekend 2010.

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21C Magazine: This is Your Brain Online

I compiled my thoughts on a bunch of recent books about the internet, social concerns, and brain matters into a piece called “This is Your Brain Online: Recent Books on Cognition and Connection” for 21C Magazine, many of which have been hashed out right here on this site.

Here’s an excerpt:

Regarding public cell phone use, comedian Bill Maher once quipped that if he wanted to be so privy to one’s most intimate thoughts, he’d read his or her blog. Nancy Baym addresses this technologically enabled collusion of public and private, as well as the more traditionally debated clashes, in Personal Connections in the Digital Age (Polity, 2010). Baym’s is by turns all-encompassing, in that she covers nearly every epistemological viewpoint on so-called social media expressed thus far, and all-purpose, in that anyone can read this book and see how these structures of knowledge apply to their own use of technology. In her study of technology’s influence on social connections, she breaks it down into seven key concepts: interactivity, temporal structure, social cues, storage, replicability, reach, and mobility. Sure, any time one attempts to slice up such a malleable and ever-changing landscape into discrete pieces one runs the risk of missing something. This process, one of closing off an open system in order to study it, is necessary if we are ever to learn anything about that system. Nancy Baym has collected, synthesized, and added to the legacy of digital media and indeed technology studies at large. This book is a great leap forward.

Many thanks to Ashley Crawford for the opportunity to contribute to 21C. Read the full piece here.

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Get Em to the Geek: Geekend 2010

I scarcely know where to start. Geekend is the beautifully geeky brainchild of Sloane Kelly, Jacob Hodesh, and Miriam Hodesh. 2010 marks the second annual meeting of what everyone familiar hopes will be many years of the interactive conference. It has just the right balance of size and intensity.

I didn’t get to Savannah until late on Day 2, so I roamed around downtown by myself Friday night. I stepped into a raucous karaoke session and had the biggest beer I’ve ever seen. No problem not finishing it because in Savannah, you can drink in the streets. To-go cups are a normal courtesy, and I took one and finished my beer, strolling languidly back to my hotel.

Immediately upon arriving at the Coastal Georgia Center on Saturday morning, I was rushed into the geek melée. Swag bag and badge in hand, I sneaked off to the speakers’ green room to finish the final tweaks on my presentation. People always say of SXSW Interactive that the best stuff happens in the margins, that the sideline conversations are always better than the panels and talks. Well, as much as it resembles SXSWi, Geekend is not quite like that. I’m not saying this because I was one of the speakers this year, I’m saying it because Geekend’s organization and size lends itself to round-the-clock stimulation. Sure, the chats in the hallways and at dinners are productive, enlightening, and awesome, but they do not outshine the scheduled talks.

My talk was called “How to Do Stuff and Be Happy” and was loosely based on my previous post of the same name. It seems to have gone over well, and I had numerous inspired chats with attendees and other speakers over the rest of the time I was in Savannah: so many amazing people all in one beautiful city for a very limited time. From futurists (e.g., Frank Spencer and Scott Smith) and future-of-music geeks (e.g., Aaron Ford and Jack DeYoung), to indie entrepreneurs (e.g., Noah Everett and Scott Stratten) and big-media programmers (e.g., Oscar Gerardo and Craig Johnston), as well as just plain badasses (e.g., Maria Anderson, Zachary Dominitz, Pete Hottelet, et al.): It’s a pressure cooker of inspiration.

The closing after-party at SEED Eco-Lounge was the perfect, weekend-ending, chaotic spectacle: fire juggling, ribbon/curtain dancing lady (check the photos), loud, mashed-up hits, and literal dancing in the streets. Geek bedlam!

Geekend 2010 was one of those events where saying “thank you” to the organizers, the speakers, and all of the attendees just sounds ridiculous–but I’ll say it anyway: Thank you! See you next year!

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Here are a bunch of pictures I’ve gathered from the event. Many thanks to the camera-wielding folks I borrowed these from (e.g, Sloane Kelly, Jennifer Parsons, Josh Branstetter, and Rhiannon Modzelewski). And a special thanks goes out to Alex Sandoval and Rhiannon Modzelewski for hauling me around, taking me to the fair, and letting me sleep on their couch that last night. You folks are saints!

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The Essential Tension of Ideas

One of the key insights in Richard Florida’s latest book, The Great Reset (Harper, 2010) is that rapid transit increases the exchange of ideas and thereby spurs innovation. Where the car used to provide this mass connection, now it hinders it. Increasingly, our cognitive surplus is sitting traffic.

Ideas are networks, Steven Johnson argues in his new book, Where Good Ideas Come From (Riverhead, 2010). The book takes Florida’s tack, comparing cities to coral reefs in that their structure fosters innovation. Good ideas come from connected collectives, so connectivity is paramount.

Human history in essence is the history of ideas. — H. G. Wells

On the other end of the spectrum, in a recent post about Twitter, David Weinberger writes,

…despite the “Who cares what you had for breakfast?” crowd, it’s important that we’ve been filling the new social spaces — blogs, social networking sites, Twitter, messaging in all forms, shared creativity in every format — with the everyday and quotidian. When we don’t have to attract others by behaving outlandishly, we behave in the boring ways that make life livable. In so doing, we make the Net a better reflection of who we are.

And since we are taking the Net as the image of who we are, and since who we think we are is broadly determinative of who we become, this matters.

His description sounds like we’re evening out our representations of our online selves, reconciling them with our IRL selves, initiating a corrective of sorts. Coincidentally, in their sad version of “The SEED Salon,” a recent issue of WIRED had Kevin Kelly and Steven Johnson discuss the roots of innovation (by way of plugging their respective new books; here they are discussing same at the New York Public Library). Kelly states,

Ten years ago, I was arguing that the problem with TV was that there wasn’t enough bad TV. Making TV was so expensive that accountants prevented it from becoming really crappy—or really great. It was all mediocre. But that was before YouTube. Now there is great TV!

It sounds as though Weinberger and Kelly are calling for or defending a sort of “infodiversity,” which one would think would be a core tenet of media ecology. As Kelly puts it in What Technology Wants (Viking, 2010), “Both life and technology seem to be based on immaterial flows of information” (p. 10). He continues in WIRED,

To create something great, you need the means to make a lot of really bad crap. Another example is spectrum. One reason we have this great explosion of innovation in wireless right now is that the US deregulated spectrum. Before that, spectrum was something too precious to be wasted on silliness. But when you deregulate—and say, OK, now waste it—then you get Wi-Fi.

In science, Thomas Kuhn called this idea “the essential tension.” In his book of the same name (University of Chicago Press, 1977), he described it as a tug-of-war between tradition and innovation. Kuhn wrote that this tension is essential, “…because the old must be revalued and reordered when assimilating the new” (p. 227). This is one of those ideas that infects one’s thinking in toto. As soon as I read about the essential tension, I began to see it everywhere — in music, in movies, in art, and indeed, in science. In all of the above, Weinberger, Johnson, and Kelly are all talking about and around this idea, in some instances the innovation side, and in others, the tradition side. We need both.

One cannot learn anything that is more than one step away from what one already knows. Learning progresses one step or level at a time. Johnson explores this idea in Where Good Ideas Come From by evoking Stuart Kauffman‘s “adjacent possible” (a term Johnson uses hundreds of times to great annoyance). The adjacent possible is that next step away. It is why innovation must be rooted in tradition. Go too far out and no one understands you, you are “ahead of your time.” Take the next step into the adjacent possible that no one else saw, and you have innovated. Taken another way, H. G. Wells once said that to write great science fiction, one must adopt a perspective that is two steps away from the current time. Going only one away is too familiar, and three is too far out. As Kelly puts it in the WIRED piece, “Innovating is about more than just having the idea yourself; you also have to bring everyone else to where your idea is. And that becomes really difficult if you’re too many steps ahead.” A new technology, literally “the knowledge of a skill,” is–in its very essence–the same thing as a new idea. For instance, Apple’s Newton was too many steps ahead of or away from what was happening at the time of its release. I’m sure you can think of several other examples.

Johnson, who has a knack for having at least one (usually more) infectious idea per book, further addresses the process of innovation with what he calls the “slow hunch.” This is the required incubation period of an innovative idea. The slow hunch often needs to find another hunch in order to come to fruition. That is, one person with an idea often needs to be coupled with another who has an idea so that the two can spur each other into action, beyond the power of either by itself (see the video below for a better explanation). It’s an argument for our increasing connectivity, and a damn good one.

That is not to say that there aren’t and won’t be problems. I think Kevin Kelly lays it out perfectly here:

…[T]here will be problems tomorrow because progress is not utopia. It is easy to mistake progressivism as utopianism because where else does increasing and everlasting improvement point to except utopia? Sadly, that confuses a direction with a destination. The future as unsoiled technological perfection is unattainable; the future as a territory of continuously expending possibilities is not only attainable but also exactly the road we are on now (p. 101).

———————–

Here’s the book trailer for Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From [runtime: 4:07]:

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References:

Florida, R. (2010). The great reset. New York: Harper.

Johnson, S. (2010). Where good ideas come from. New York: Riverhead.

Kelly, K. (2010). What technology wants. New York: Viking.

Kuhn, T. (1977). The essential tension. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Weinberger, D. (2010). “Why it’s good to be boring on the web.” JoHo The Blog.

WIRED. (2010, October) “Kevin Kelly and Steven Johnson on where ideas come from.” Wired.com.

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Douglas Rushkoff: The User’s Dilemma

For over two decades, Douglas Rushkoff has been dragging us all out near the horizon, trying to show us glimpses of our own future. Though he’s written books on everything from counterculture and video games to advertising and Judaism, he’s always maintained a media theorist’s bent: one part Marshall McLuhan, one part Neil Postman, and one part a mix of many significant others. Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age (OR Books, 2010) finds him back at the core of what he does. Simply put, this little book (it runs just shy of 150 pages) is the missing manual for our wild, wired world.

“Whoever controls the metaphor governs the mind.” — Hakim Bey

Rushkoff agrees with many media thinkers that we are going through a major shift in the way we conceive, connect, and communicate with each other. His concern is that we’re conceding control of this shift to forces that may not have our best interests in mind. “We teach kids how to use software to write,” he writes, “but not how to write software. This means they have access to the capabilities given to them by others, but not the power to determine the value-creating capabilities of these technologies for themselves” (p. 13). We’re conceiving our worlds using metaphors invented by others. This is an important insight and one that helps make up the core of his critique. This book is more Innis’ biases of media than it is McLhaun’s laws of media, and it left me astounded — especially after reading several books on the subject that were the textual equivalent of fly-over states. Program or Be Programmed is a welcome stop along the way.

I first interviewed Doug Rushkoff in 1999. We’ve stayed in touch since and discussed many ideas over the intervening decade, but we haven’t recorded any of these exchanges. I used this book as an opportunity to ask him a few questions.

Roy Christopher: Program or Be Programmed seems to distill quite a lot of your thinking about our online world from the past twenty-odd years. What prompted you to directly address these issues now?

Douglas Rushkoff: I guess it’s because the first generation of true “screenagers” or digital natives have finally come of age and, to my surprise, seem less digitally literate than their digital immigrant counterparts. I’ve written a number of books applying the insights of digital culture — of its do-it-yourself, hacker ethos — to other areas, such as government, religion, and the economy. But I realize that we don’t even relate to digital culture from the perspective of cultural programmers. We tend to accept the programs we use as given circumstances, rather than as the creations of people with intentions.

So I wanted to go back and write something of a “poetics” of digital media, sharing the main biases of digital technologies so that people can approach them as real users, makers, and programmers, rather than just as passive consumers.

If anything in particular prompted me, it was watching the way smart writers and thinkers were arguing back and forth in books and documentaries about whether digital technology is good for us or bad for us. I think it’s less a question of what the technology is doing to us than what we are choosing to do to one another with these technologies. If we’re even choosing anything at all.

RC: You mention in the book that anyone who seems a bit too critical of digital media is labeled a Luddite and a party-pooper, yet you were able to be critical, serious, and hopeful all at the same time. What’s the difference between your approach and that of other critics of all-things-digital?

DR: I think the main difference is that I’m more concerned with human intention and how it is either supported or repressed in the digital realm. Empathy is repressed, the ability to connect over long distanced is enhanced. I go down to the very structure and functioning of these tools and interfaces to reveal how they are intrinsically biased toward certain kinds of outcomes.

So I’m less concerned with how a technology effects us, than how our application or misapplication of a technology works for or against our intentions. And, perhaps more importantly, how the intentions of our programmers remain embedded in the technologies we use. I’m not judging a technology one way or the other; rather, I am calling for people to make some effort to understand what the technologies they are using were made for, and whether that makes it the right tool for the job they’re using it for.

RC: You evoke Harold Innis throughout this book. Do you think there’s something that he covers more thoroughly or usefully than other media theorists since?

DR: I think he was better at looking at media shaping the nature and tenor of the social activity occurring on it, or around it. He’s the guy who would have seen how cell phones change the nature of our social contract on the street, turning a once-public space into lots of separate little private spaces. As far as media-ecology goes, he was probably the purest theorist.

RC: The last programming class I took was a Visual Basic class in which even the programming was obscured by a graphical interface: there was little in the way of real code. For those of us interested, what’s the first step in becoming a programmer now?

DR: I guess it depends on your interests. There are many different places to start. You could go back and learn Basic, one of the simplest computer languages, in order to see the way lines of code in a program flow. Or you could even just get a program like Director, and sequence some events. Hypercard was a great little tool that gave people a sense of running a script.

If I were starting, I’d just grab a big fat book that starts from the beginning, like Dan Shiffman’s book Learning Processing (Morgan Kaufman, 2008). You can sit down with a book like that and, with no knowledge at all, end up with a fairly good sense of programming in a couple of weeks.

I’m not asking everyone be a programmer at this point. Not this generation, anyway. That’s a bit like asking illiterate adults to learn how to read when they can just listen the radio or books on tape. I get that. But for those who will be living in increasingly digital spaces, programming will amount to the new literacy.

RC: Though you never stray too far, you seem to have come back to your core work in this book. What’s next?

DR: I have no idea, really. Having come “home” to a book on pure media theory applied to our real experience, I feel like I’ve returned to my core competence. I feel like I should stick here a while and talk about these issues for a year or so until they really sink in.

I’ve got a graphic novel coming out next year, finally, called ADD. It’s about kids who are raised from birth (actually, earlier) to be video game testers. I’d love to see that story get developed for other media, and then get to play around in television or film. There are also rumblings about doing another Frontline documentary. Something following up on “Digital Nation,” which I’d like to do in order to get more of my own ideas out there to the non-reading public.

I guess we’ll see.

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Astra Taylor and Laura Hanna (the filmmakers behind the film Zizek!) put this short video together to help illustrate the ideas in Rushkoff’s Program or Be Programmed [runtime: 2:18]:

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