by J. Betty Ray
As perhaps the first person on the planet to publicly state that video
games, computers and TV remote controls are fundamental building blocks
to a healthy adulthood, writer/media analyst Douglas Rushkoff is a rare
voice in a world lamenting the demise of the American attention span. At
36, Rushkoff is an Elder of That Generation, and believes that new
technologies in media and publishing are granting us the power to take
conscious control over our media intake. These technologies, he says, not
only break the spell of passive media consumption, but are actually aiding
and abetting what he calls, "a global evolution of consciousness" that is
breaking down established Western structures faster than you can say
"You've got mail!"
With industry deregulations and the onslaught of personal publishing technologies, the media is no longer dominated by a group of guys in suits
instilling groupthink into the herds. Instead, he believes, it has evolved
into a complex interactive and organic system that is an extension of
human consciousness. "We're moving into a world where an increasing number
of people want to direct their own experience." he says. "Personal
technology and publishing allow us to do just that. TV can show you a
dying baby, but there's nothing you can do. Eventually, the nerve ending
goes dead. Interactive media and personal publishing lets you at least say
something, and perhaps choose to DO something, too."
Rushkoff's perspective weaves elements of chaos theory and quantum mechanics with eastern mysticism and good old American capitalism. Rushkoff's next
effort is, as he says, "a simple book about what it's like to go into a
shopping mall: What are they doing to your head and how you can break it?"
In the meantime, he's dreaming about living in a house made of Legos, and
is trying to convince the Lego company to build him one for free.
--J. Betty Ray
-- THE INTERVIEW --
Tripod: What do you see is the role of personal publishing in this evolution you've written about?
DR: Really, there are two ways to interact with media. Media can
either impact your life or you can impact the world through media. If
media is exclusively a way for others to impact on you, then the evolution
of technology will be a further degradation of your ability to express who
you are and to influence the world around you. You'll be programmed that
much further and you'll be further victimized by external influences.
But if you're able to think of media and technology as a way to express
yourself and extend who you are — literally, to extend your nervous
system through media in one form or another — then the more
technology there is in this world, the more you will feel extended out,
reaching out and touching the lives of other people.
Tripod: So you're saying you think it's a necessity.
DR: I don't think it's possible to have one without the other and
stay healthy. If a person is going to be a receiver of information and
influence and other people's thoughts through new technology, then it
behooves them to also be a transmitter.
Tripod: Why? What's so potent about the media as it is now?
DR: Once media becomes out of the control of any one select group
of people, and becomes a more natural system — which I think it has
— it becomes part of the mechanism by which society regulates itself.
In other words, rather than having Rupert Murdoch or William Randolph
Hearst regulating us, it becomes the way we direct ourselves. It's a
collective dreamspace where we try out new scenarios. The more people can
contribute to the collective dream, the more influence they have over the
collective reality. Our mediaspace is the battleground of a
many-century-old ideological war. Only recently have plain old folks like
us had the ability to enter it and change it. This does make a
difference.
Tripod: I love that. It is like a giant trough of human
imagination.
DR: If you go to a shrink, they're going to ask you what your
dreams are. They're not going to tell you to stop dreaming, even if you're
dreaming about killing or raping someone. So whatever our media does
— however gross or weird it looks — we shouldn't repress it. If
we repress our collective dreamspace, we'll have waking hallucinations as
a culture the same way that if you repress the dreamspace of an
individual, he'll have waking hallucinations when he's walking around. We
aren't letting our collective imagination do a free-for-all because we're
afraid of what we'll think.
Tripod: I read Andre
Leonard's attack on you in Wired, who seemed to suggest that kids'
fascination and participation in media is nothing more than another aspect
of childhood for marketers to exploit. Do you have any comments on
that?
DR:What he doesn't realize and what most well-meaning adults don't
realize is that we live in a consumer-driven media space, not a
programming- driven one any more. So yeah, the kids will jump on to
something, but they're only going to jump onto the one of a thousand
things put out there that actually appeals to their inner sensibility to
where we're going and what we should be doing. I mean Wired
magazine is pure hype. They're attempting to direct our future by painting
a picture of the world that says "Business is in charge," and frightening
people into believing that. In one sense, reality itself is a competition
of world views and the means of competition is spinning and hyping. But
what I'd love to do is opt out of that. I feel like in some ways a victim
of the hype wars. I was trying to write some books saying "Look, this is
how it could be. If you just embrace this stuff and embrace your kids and
embrace where things are going, it's not an ugly picture, it's a beautiful
picture."
Tripod: So what is this evolution? Where are we headed? And what about
the 99% of the planet that has never seen a computer, let alone created an
ezine?
DR: There's only global, that's the whole point. Right now, we're
in a position where we're aspiring towards survival of the whole species
— or the whole planet, really. Evolution is not a competition, as
most anti-evolution academics complain, but rather a collaboration. A
team sport. Different groups and individuals develop different aspects of
themselves at different times, but we're all part of the same organism.
As I see it, it is Western culture that needs to understand this, the
organismic relationship of life on earth. It is we who need the remedial
help, not your 99%.
Tripod: One more question: What is your spiritual background?
DR: I got circumcised and bar mitvahed. I took acid. I had sex.
Tripod: Cool.
J. Betty Ray is a writer who revels in exploring the relationship between
the teeming mass of media to itself and to the world at large. She is the resident empath for The Chankstore, and is teaching herself the gamut of multimedia applications in her spare time in pursuit of that ever-elusive state of mind that can only be described as, "You know you're soaking in it."
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