“It’s not a mere speeding up, however much our lifestyles and technologies have accelerated the rate at which we attempt to do things. It’s more of a diminishment of anything that isn’t happening right now – and the onslaught of everything that supposedly is.” – Douglas Rushkoff
Early post this week: I’m in the air on Sunday, so won’t be able to post. I deny any irony in early-posting a review about bringing everything into the present.
Information can be either a storage or flow. Twitter is a flow: there is no point in going back and rewatching twitter feeds, because once it loses its present immediacy, it loses impact. We cannot catch up with it. Books, on the other hand, are storage, and can be returned to repeatedly. The problem with modernity is that we confuse the two, scanning a digital article with the same focus as we give our facebook news feed, and missing out on much of its value.
Rushkoff argues that we have begun to experience life as one long moment, always in the present, with no beginning and no end. As a result, we have stopped emphasizing narratives in our movies and tv shows; we attempt to be everywhere at once both in attention and physically; we try to make everything happen now rather than waiting; and we oversee patterns due to an overdose of data points. It is an interesting and compelling point, that we are placing less and less emphasis on things that are not happening now, and are overwhelmed by everything that supposedly is.
Beyond that (admittedly interesting) claim, however, I don’t find the rest of his thesis convincing. His argument that we no longer value narrative arcs, supposedly evidenced in flashback heavy Family Guy episodes, just doesn’t seem reasonable. Modern life is certainly accelerated, as Alvin Toffler argued in his book Future Shock, and it seems that the faster it gets, the faster we demand it goes. It seems to me though that we show just as much need for narrative arcs as ever, though perhaps less patience for long ones. Family guy still has a story – it’s just short and shallow.
Despite being on a fascinating topic, Present Shock didn’t add as much as I had hoped to the discussion, introducing few new ideas or ways of thinking about the world. Yes, multi-tasking brains do worse on almost every measure, but that’s fairly well recognized. His discussion of moon phases affecting chemical balances in the body, on the other hand, sounds a lot more like junk science, and the fact that he doesn’t provide any actual evidence for it suggests there may not be much. There is interesting information in Present Shock, but it is overwhelmed by the irrelevant and the unlikely to be causal.
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