Review of PRESENT SHOCK by Douglas Rushkoff

That's it! We have arrived in the future. Rushkoff's books is an allusion to Alvin Toffler's 1970 warning FUTURE SHOCK. Do we travel by jetpack or date robots? Not yet, but I guess you could say the potential is there.

What I found most troubling was the first chapter of Rushkoff's book, in which he does little more than encyclopedize examples for what he mourns as "the narrative collapse."  Rushkoff posits that our need and value in traditional (read "linear") storytelling has ceased in wake of our technologic obsession with instant gratification. I found this argument thin and presumptuous. Citing Homer, Joseph Campbell, and contemporary sitcoms, Rushkoff makes the case that linear narrative is somehow more valuable and morally worthy than rising experimental/fragmented/disjointed forms. However, the most experimental example Rushkoff can muster to demonstrate his point is Tarantino's "Pulp Fiction," which now, only 19 years later, doesn't seem all that disjointed.  Judging from what's playing at the box office and the current best-seller list, the masses still enjoy traditional narrative, and I don't see that changing any time soon!

"Present Shock" is an allusion to Toffler's 1970 social commentary calling for a collective awareness (and alert) for the future

Although throughout much of the book Rushkoff insists that evolving technology accounts for all shifts in recent paradigm,  he does not completely dismiss the role of human behavior and responsibility. Rushkoff writes, “Facebook’s reduction of people to predictively modeled profiles and investment banking’s convolution of the marketplace into an algorithmic battleground were not the choices of machines.” Thus, the vibrating iPhone is not the culprit for our current lack of attention span; we are.

I think it is too soon to examine the lasting impacts evolving technology might leave on human behavior. In the mean time, I see too many people using technology as a vehicle to aid the well being, education, and mindfulness of others to join Rushkoff on his sanctimonious soapbox.