What do you think?
Rate this book
Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age
The debate over whether the Net is good or bad for us fills the airwaves and the blogosphere. But for all the heat of claim and counter-claim, the argument is essentially beside the point: it’s here; it’s everywhere. The real question is, do we direct technology, or do we let ourselves be directed by it and those who have mastered it? “Choose the former,” writes Rushkoff, “and you gain access to the control panel of civilization. Choose the latter, and it could be the last real choice you get to make.” In ten chapters, composed of ten “commands” accompanied by original illustrations from comic artist Leland Purvis, Rushkoff provides cyberenthusiasts and technophobes alike with the guidelines to navigate this new universe.
In this spirited, accessible poetics of new media, Rushkoff picks up where Marshall McLuhan left off, helping readers come to recognize programming as the new literacy of the digital age––and as a template through which to see beyond social conventions and power structures that have vexed us for centuries. This is a friendly little book with a big and actionable message.
World-renowned media theorist and counterculture figure Douglas Rushkoff is the originator of ideas such as “viral media,” “social currency” and “screenagers.” He has been at the forefront of digital society from its beginning, correctly predicting the rise of the net, the dotcom boom and bust, as well as the current financial crisis. He is a familiar voice on NPR, face on PBS, and writer in publications from Discover Magazine to the New York Times.
“Douglas Rushkoff is one of the great thinkers––and writers––of our time.” —Timothy Leary
“Rushkoff is damn smart. As someone who understood the digital revolution faster and better than almost anyone, he shows how the internet is a social transformer that should change the way your business culture operates." —Walter Isaacson
In this spirited, accessible poetics of new media, Rushkoff picks up where Marshall McLuhan left off, helping readers come to recognize programming as the new literacy of the digital age––and as a template through which to see beyond social conventions and power structures that have vexed us for centuries. This is a friendly little book with a big and actionable message.
World-renowned media theorist and counterculture figure Douglas Rushkoff is the originator of ideas such as “viral media,” “social currency” and “screenagers.” He has been at the forefront of digital society from its beginning, correctly predicting the rise of the net, the dotcom boom and bust, as well as the current financial crisis. He is a familiar voice on NPR, face on PBS, and writer in publications from Discover Magazine to the New York Times.
“Douglas Rushkoff is one of the great thinkers––and writers––of our time.” —Timothy Leary
“Rushkoff is damn smart. As someone who understood the digital revolution faster and better than almost anyone, he shows how the internet is a social transformer that should change the way your business culture operates." —Walter Isaacson
152 pages, Paperback
First published November 1, 2010
About the author
Douglas Rushkoff
117 books908 followersDouglas Rushkoff is a New York-based writer, columnist and lecturer on technology, media and popular culture.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 203 reviews
March 22, 2011
First, the good. Rushkoff makes important points, and I thought the best were made in the final chapter that bears the title of the book. Rushkoff breathes new life into the importance of controlling the means of production. Unlike other tools (the woodworking hand tools and knitting needles of which I am so very fond, for instance) software is programmed. Well, obviously. But this matters because programming is a process; the code we use in the form of software is the end result of a particular sequence of logic, a pattern of thinking that we follow without even realizing it and, unlike other tools, patterns that most of us cannot modify. There's a lot of conformity in an environment that gives us the illusion of choice and independence.
I appreciate the fact that Rushkoff is one of the few voices pointing out that knowing how to use Facebook or send text messages is NOT digital literacy. If you don't know how to write code, you're not digitally literate. Rushkoff makes this point through strong stories. Here's an excerpt of one of them:
"One of the US Air Force generals charged with building and protecting the Global Information Grid has a problem: recruitment. As the man in charge of many of the Air Force’s coolest computer toys, he has no problem attracting kids who want to fly drones, shoot lasers from satellites, or steer missiles into Persian Gulf terrorist camps from the safety of Shreveport. They’re lining up for those assignments. No, the general’s challenge is finding kids capable of programming these weapons systems—or even having the education, inclination, and mental discipline required to begin learning programming from scratch."
The chapter titled "You Are Never Completely Right" is another strong one. I think never being completely right is a wonderful thing, but Rushkoff points out how it can result in a reduction of complexity. The desire for a reduction of complexity is in evidence in U.S. culture, the "I'll believe what I want to believe, evidence be damned, because there's so much evidence on all sides I'll just pick the one I like."
The book also contains more common things we hear a lot of. Rushkoff says to not be always on, to be more present rather than always reporting on what we're doing rather than experiencing it more fully. We've heard this before and Rushkoff doesn't bring a fresh perspective to it.
I don't agree with everything he's written (wouldn't life be boring if I did?!), but I'm glad he's written it. Rushkoff's provocative style does what I imagine it's intended to do: provoke critical thinking. They style is, however, sometimes needlessly alarmist.
I appreciate the fact that Rushkoff is one of the few voices pointing out that knowing how to use Facebook or send text messages is NOT digital literacy. If you don't know how to write code, you're not digitally literate. Rushkoff makes this point through strong stories. Here's an excerpt of one of them:
"One of the US Air Force generals charged with building and protecting the Global Information Grid has a problem: recruitment. As the man in charge of many of the Air Force’s coolest computer toys, he has no problem attracting kids who want to fly drones, shoot lasers from satellites, or steer missiles into Persian Gulf terrorist camps from the safety of Shreveport. They’re lining up for those assignments. No, the general’s challenge is finding kids capable of programming these weapons systems—or even having the education, inclination, and mental discipline required to begin learning programming from scratch."
The chapter titled "You Are Never Completely Right" is another strong one. I think never being completely right is a wonderful thing, but Rushkoff points out how it can result in a reduction of complexity. The desire for a reduction of complexity is in evidence in U.S. culture, the "I'll believe what I want to believe, evidence be damned, because there's so much evidence on all sides I'll just pick the one I like."
The book also contains more common things we hear a lot of. Rushkoff says to not be always on, to be more present rather than always reporting on what we're doing rather than experiencing it more fully. We've heard this before and Rushkoff doesn't bring a fresh perspective to it.
I don't agree with everything he's written (wouldn't life be boring if I did?!), but I'm glad he's written it. Rushkoff's provocative style does what I imagine it's intended to do: provoke critical thinking. They style is, however, sometimes needlessly alarmist.
Read
December 16, 2010This book definitely makes more sense when read alongside the recent ones by Kevin Kelly and by Jaron Lanier. Like them, it's something of a correction on the tech-evangelism that has marked much of its author's earlier works. If Lanier's is a rangy diatribe, and Kelly's a concertedly developed argument, Rushkoff's is a list: it's 10 ideas, laid out plainly for a common reader. The last of these 10 ideas ("commands," a joke on the 10 commandments), the one from which the book takes its title, is the important one. The title pretty much says it all: in a world that is mediated increasingly by software, our lives are in many ways affected by the decision-making of the people who program the software. People who don't program are, in effect, to some degree or another, at the mercy of those who do. The answer? Learn to program. It sounds simplistic, and to some extent it is, but demystifying programming (it's not rocket science; it's the math equivalent of writing intelligently) is a valuable lesson.
February 17, 2015
The ideas in this book are 5 star worthy though the execution a 3 but the ideas are very important, so worth the read. Each of us as well as humanity need to have a deliberate relationship with technology, Rushkoff argues. Let us be clear Rushkoff is no crackpot he is degreed, learned, and thoughtful (his bio - http://www.rushkoff.com/about/). He definitively makes the argument that the debate over the societal value of the internet and technology is irrelevant (he states the obvious, “it is here to stay so move on,” in such a way that should convince even the spiritual descendants of the Luddites), Rushkoff raises the more important question of do we direct technology or be controlled by those who master technology and the technology itself? “Choose the former, and you gain access to the control panel of civilization. Choose the latter, and it could be the last real choice you get to make.” A bit dire and seemingly over dramatic, Rushkoff proceeds to develop a well argued position that indeed we are not looking at the opportunity with enough self awareness. There are a number of substantial points that Rushkoff discusses and actually calls out in an article that I found to be just as benefical as the book for those that don’t have the desire or time to read the book (http://www.shareable.net/blog/program...
Every time humans acquired a new technology they had a dual nature both passive and active: “When human beings acquired language, we learned not just how to listen but how to speak. When we gained literacy, we learned not just how to read but how to write. And as we move into an increasingly digital reality, we must learn not just how to use programs but how to make them.”
Though the evolution of digital technology seems to be a natural progression built on previous innovations, it is significantly different: “Computers and networks are more than mere tools: They are like living things, themselves. Unlike a rake, a pen, or even a jackhammer, a digital technology is programmed. This means it comes with instructions not just for its use, but also for itself. And as such technologies come to characterize the future of the way we live and work, the people programming them take on an increasingly important role in shaping our world and how it works. After that, it’s the digital technologies themselves that will be shaping our world, both with and without our explicit cooperation.”
Our future has tremendous possibilities: “Just as words gave people the ability to pass on knowledge for what we now call civilization, networked activity could soon offer us access to shared thinking—an extension of consciousness still inconceivable to most of us today. The operating principles of commerce and culture—from supply and demand to command and control—could conceivably give way to an entirely more engaged, connected, and collaborative mode of participation.”
Technology provides disruption and wields unexpected drawbacks: ”Educators who looked forward to accessing the world’s bounty of information for their lessons are faced with students who believe that finding an answer on Wikipedia is the satisfactory fulfillment of an inquiry. Parents who believed their kids would intuitively multitask their way to professional success are now concerned those same kids are losing the ability to focus on any one thing...Young people who saw in social networks a way to redefine themselves and their allegiances across formerly sacrosanct boundaries are now conforming to the logic of social networking profiles and finding themselves the victims of marketers and character assassination. Bankers who believed that digital entrepreneurship would revive a sagging industrial age economy are instead finding it impossible to generate new value through capital investment. A news media that saw in information networks new opportunities for citizen journalism and responsive, twenty-four-hour news gathering has grown sensationalist, unprofitable, and devoid of useful facts.Educated laypeople who saw in the net a new opportunity for amateur participation in previously cordoned-off sectors of media and society instead see the indiscriminate mashing and mixing up of pretty much everything, in an environment where the loud and lewd drown out anything that takes more than a few moments to understand. Social and community organizers who saw in social media a new, safe way for people to gather, voice their opinions, and effect bottom-up change are often recoiling at the way networked anonymity breeds mob behavior, merciless attack, and thoughtless responses. A society that looked at the Internet as a path toward highly articulated connections and new methods of creating meaning is instead finding itself disconnected, denied deep thinking, and drained of enduring values. Faced with a networked future that seems to favor the distracted over the focused, the automatic over the considered, and the contrary over the compassionate, it’s time to press the pause button and ask what all this means to the future of our work, our lives, and even our species.”
We know technology is here to stay and we don’t want to keep perpetuating the negative aspects of digital living, so Rushkoff suggests to affect significant control over technology, we first have to understand that THINKING is different: “thinking itself is no longer—at least no longer exclusively—a personal activity. It’s something happening in a new, networked fashion...while computers are free to network and think in more advanced ways than we ever will.”
We must engage differently both individually and collectively: “Interior life, such as it is, began in the Axial Age and was then only truly recognized as late as the Renaissance. It is a construction that has served its role in getting us this far, but must be loosened to include entirely new forms of collective and extra-human activity.” Rushkoff emphatically states he does not see humans as a hive species, but cautions resisting, ignoring, or opting out of this networked, digital future is to lose out.
Humans have experience with ground-shifting transformations (we are talking about change that allows humans a completely different perspective that results with a transformative way of relating to and interacting with the world) numerous times in the past. “Language led to shared learning, cumulative experience, and the possibility for progress. The alphabet led to accountability...and contractual law. The printing press and private reading led to a new experience of individuality, a personal relationship to God, the Protestant Reformation, human rights, and the Enlightenment. With the advent of a new medium, the status quo not only comes under scrutiny; it is revised and rewritten by those who have gained new access to the tools of its creation.”
Each time our ability to capitalize on the situation has fallen short and limited benefits only to a small elite: “The Axial Age invention of the twenty-two-letter alphabet did not lead to a society of literate Israelite readers, but a society of hearers, who would gather in the town square to listen to the Torah scroll read to them by a rabbi. Yes, it was better than being ignorant slaves, but it was a result far short of the medium’s real potential. Likewise, the invention of the printing press in the Renaissance led not to a society of writers but one of readers; except for a few cases, access to the presses was reserved, by force, for the use of those already in power. Broadcast radio and television were really just extensions of the printing press: expensive, one-to-many media that promote the mass distribution of the stories and ideas of a small elite at the center. We don’t make TV; we watch it. Computers and networks finally offer us the ability to write. And we do write with them on our websites, blogs, and social networks.”
What we are missing and not capitalizing on currently with technology is just as limiting: “The underlying capability of the computer era is actually programming—which almost none of us knows how to do. We simply use the programs that have been made for us, and enter our text in the appropriate box on the screen. We teach kids how to use software to write, 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. Like the participants of media revolutions before our own, we have embraced the new technologies and literacies of our age without actually learning how they work and work on us.”
Rushkoff concludes we are woefully lacking control of our own destiny: “And so we, too, remain one step behind the capability actually being offered us. Only an elite—sometimes a new elite, but an elite nonetheless—gains the ability to fully exploit the new medium on offer. The rest learn to be satisfied with gaining the ability offered by the last new medium. The people hear while the rabbis read; the people read while those with access to the printing press write; today we write, while our techno-elite programs. As a result, most of society remains one full dimensional leap of awareness and capability behind the few who manage to monopolize access to the real power of any media age.”
We lack self awareness about what the opportunities are and instead focus on the wrong things: “We don’t celebrate the human stars of this medium, the way we marveled at the stars of radio, film, or television; we are mesmerized instead by the screens and touchpads themselves...Instead of pursuing new abilities, we fetishize new toys...Meanwhile, we tend to think less about how to integrate new tools into our lives than about how simply to keep up...Newspapers go online less because they want to than because they think they have to—and with largely disastrous results. Likewise, elementary school boards adopt “laptop” curriculums less because they believe that they’ll teach better than because they fear their students will miss out on something if they don’t. We feel proud that we’re willing to do or spend whatever it takes to use this stuff—with little regard to how it actually impacts our lives.”
We are headed to a world where we extend human agency through external tools that can think independent of us: “The strategies we have developed to cope with new mediating technologies in the past will no longer serve us—however similar in shape the computing revolution may appear to previous reckonings with future shock. For instance, the unease pondering what it might mean to have some of our thinking done out of body by an external device is arguably just a computer-era version of the challenges to self-image or “proprioception” posed by industrial machinery. The industrial age challenged us to rethink the limits of the human body: Where does my body end and the tool begin? The digital age challenges us to rethink the limits of the human mind: What are the boundaries of my cognition? And while machines once replaced and usurped the value of human labor, computers and networks do more than usurp the value of human thought. They not only copy our intellectual processes—our repeatable programs—but they also discourage our more complex processes—our higher order cognition, contemplation, innovation, and meaning making that should be the reward of “outsourcing” our arithmetic to silicon chips in the first place.”
How to get on top of situation is to have a solid understanding and say in how these devices are designed or programmed. Hence the need to program or be programmed: “Back in the earliest days of personal computing, we may not have understood how our calculators worked, but we understood exactly what they were doing for us: adding one number to another, finding a square root, and so on. With computers and networks, unlike our calculators, we don’t even know what we are asking our machines to do, much less how they are going to go about doing it. Every Google search is—at least for most of us—a Hail Mary pass into the datasphere, requesting something from an opaque black box. How does it know what is relevant? How is it making its decisions? Why can’t the corporation in charge tell us? And we have too little time to consider the consequences of not knowing everything we might like to about our machines. As our own obsolescence looms, we continue to accept new technologies into our lives with little or no understanding of how these devices work and work on us. We do not know how to program our computers, nor do we care. We spend much more time and energy trying to figure out how to use them to program one another instead. And this is potentially a grave mistake.”
We are hurtled forward on this technological tsunami and in danger of losing meaning if we don’t stop and develop a new template to guide us: “No matter the breadth of its capabilities, the net will not bestow upon humans the fuel or space we need to wrestle with its implications and their meaning. We are aware of the many problems engendered by the digital era. What is called for now is a human response to the evolution of these technologies all around us. We are living in a different world than the one we grew up in—one even more profoundly different than the world of the alphabet was from the oral society that existed for millennia before it. That changing society codified what was happening to it through the Torah and eventually the Talmud, preparing people to live in a textual age. Like they did, we need to codify the changes we are undergoing, and develop a new ethical, behavioral, and business template through which to guide us. Only this time it must actually work. We are living through a real shift—one that has already crashed our economy twice, changed the way we educate and entertain ourselves, and altered the very fabric of human relationships. Yet, so far, we have very little understanding of what is happening to us and how to cope. Most of the smart folks who could help us are too busy consulting to corporations—teaching them how to maintain their faltering monopolies in the face of the digital tsunami. Who has time to consider much else, and who is going to pay for it?”
There are many biases (tendencies to think or lean a certain way) and in the digital age those biases must be deliberately reviewed and consciously adopted, modified, or rejected: “It may be true that “guns don’t kill people, people kill people”; but guns are a technology more biased to killing than, say, clock radios. Televisions are biased toward people sitting still in couches and watching. Automobiles are biased toward motion, individuality, and living in the suburbs. Oral culture is biased toward communicating in person, while written culture is biased toward communication that doesn’t happen between people in the same time and place. Film photography and its expensive processes were biased toward scarcity, while digital photography is biased toward immediate and widespread distribution. Some cameras even upload photos to websites automatically, turning the click of the shutter into an act of global publishing. To most of us, though, that “click” still feels the same, even though the results are very different. We can’t quite feel the biases shifting as we move from technology to technology, or task to task. Writing an email is not the same as writing a letter, and sending a message through a social networking service is not the same as writing an email. Each of the acts not only yields different results, but demands different mind-sets and approaches from us. Just as we think and behave differently in different settings, we think and behave differently when operating different technology. Only by understanding the biases of the media through which we engage with the world can we differentiate between what we intend, and what the machines we’re using intend for us—whether they or their programmers even know it.”
Every time humans acquired a new technology they had a dual nature both passive and active: “When human beings acquired language, we learned not just how to listen but how to speak. When we gained literacy, we learned not just how to read but how to write. And as we move into an increasingly digital reality, we must learn not just how to use programs but how to make them.”
Though the evolution of digital technology seems to be a natural progression built on previous innovations, it is significantly different: “Computers and networks are more than mere tools: They are like living things, themselves. Unlike a rake, a pen, or even a jackhammer, a digital technology is programmed. This means it comes with instructions not just for its use, but also for itself. And as such technologies come to characterize the future of the way we live and work, the people programming them take on an increasingly important role in shaping our world and how it works. After that, it’s the digital technologies themselves that will be shaping our world, both with and without our explicit cooperation.”
Our future has tremendous possibilities: “Just as words gave people the ability to pass on knowledge for what we now call civilization, networked activity could soon offer us access to shared thinking—an extension of consciousness still inconceivable to most of us today. The operating principles of commerce and culture—from supply and demand to command and control—could conceivably give way to an entirely more engaged, connected, and collaborative mode of participation.”
Technology provides disruption and wields unexpected drawbacks: ”Educators who looked forward to accessing the world’s bounty of information for their lessons are faced with students who believe that finding an answer on Wikipedia is the satisfactory fulfillment of an inquiry. Parents who believed their kids would intuitively multitask their way to professional success are now concerned those same kids are losing the ability to focus on any one thing...Young people who saw in social networks a way to redefine themselves and their allegiances across formerly sacrosanct boundaries are now conforming to the logic of social networking profiles and finding themselves the victims of marketers and character assassination. Bankers who believed that digital entrepreneurship would revive a sagging industrial age economy are instead finding it impossible to generate new value through capital investment. A news media that saw in information networks new opportunities for citizen journalism and responsive, twenty-four-hour news gathering has grown sensationalist, unprofitable, and devoid of useful facts.Educated laypeople who saw in the net a new opportunity for amateur participation in previously cordoned-off sectors of media and society instead see the indiscriminate mashing and mixing up of pretty much everything, in an environment where the loud and lewd drown out anything that takes more than a few moments to understand. Social and community organizers who saw in social media a new, safe way for people to gather, voice their opinions, and effect bottom-up change are often recoiling at the way networked anonymity breeds mob behavior, merciless attack, and thoughtless responses. A society that looked at the Internet as a path toward highly articulated connections and new methods of creating meaning is instead finding itself disconnected, denied deep thinking, and drained of enduring values. Faced with a networked future that seems to favor the distracted over the focused, the automatic over the considered, and the contrary over the compassionate, it’s time to press the pause button and ask what all this means to the future of our work, our lives, and even our species.”
We know technology is here to stay and we don’t want to keep perpetuating the negative aspects of digital living, so Rushkoff suggests to affect significant control over technology, we first have to understand that THINKING is different: “thinking itself is no longer—at least no longer exclusively—a personal activity. It’s something happening in a new, networked fashion...while computers are free to network and think in more advanced ways than we ever will.”
We must engage differently both individually and collectively: “Interior life, such as it is, began in the Axial Age and was then only truly recognized as late as the Renaissance. It is a construction that has served its role in getting us this far, but must be loosened to include entirely new forms of collective and extra-human activity.” Rushkoff emphatically states he does not see humans as a hive species, but cautions resisting, ignoring, or opting out of this networked, digital future is to lose out.
Humans have experience with ground-shifting transformations (we are talking about change that allows humans a completely different perspective that results with a transformative way of relating to and interacting with the world) numerous times in the past. “Language led to shared learning, cumulative experience, and the possibility for progress. The alphabet led to accountability...and contractual law. The printing press and private reading led to a new experience of individuality, a personal relationship to God, the Protestant Reformation, human rights, and the Enlightenment. With the advent of a new medium, the status quo not only comes under scrutiny; it is revised and rewritten by those who have gained new access to the tools of its creation.”
Each time our ability to capitalize on the situation has fallen short and limited benefits only to a small elite: “The Axial Age invention of the twenty-two-letter alphabet did not lead to a society of literate Israelite readers, but a society of hearers, who would gather in the town square to listen to the Torah scroll read to them by a rabbi. Yes, it was better than being ignorant slaves, but it was a result far short of the medium’s real potential. Likewise, the invention of the printing press in the Renaissance led not to a society of writers but one of readers; except for a few cases, access to the presses was reserved, by force, for the use of those already in power. Broadcast radio and television were really just extensions of the printing press: expensive, one-to-many media that promote the mass distribution of the stories and ideas of a small elite at the center. We don’t make TV; we watch it. Computers and networks finally offer us the ability to write. And we do write with them on our websites, blogs, and social networks.”
What we are missing and not capitalizing on currently with technology is just as limiting: “The underlying capability of the computer era is actually programming—which almost none of us knows how to do. We simply use the programs that have been made for us, and enter our text in the appropriate box on the screen. We teach kids how to use software to write, 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. Like the participants of media revolutions before our own, we have embraced the new technologies and literacies of our age without actually learning how they work and work on us.”
Rushkoff concludes we are woefully lacking control of our own destiny: “And so we, too, remain one step behind the capability actually being offered us. Only an elite—sometimes a new elite, but an elite nonetheless—gains the ability to fully exploit the new medium on offer. The rest learn to be satisfied with gaining the ability offered by the last new medium. The people hear while the rabbis read; the people read while those with access to the printing press write; today we write, while our techno-elite programs. As a result, most of society remains one full dimensional leap of awareness and capability behind the few who manage to monopolize access to the real power of any media age.”
We lack self awareness about what the opportunities are and instead focus on the wrong things: “We don’t celebrate the human stars of this medium, the way we marveled at the stars of radio, film, or television; we are mesmerized instead by the screens and touchpads themselves...Instead of pursuing new abilities, we fetishize new toys...Meanwhile, we tend to think less about how to integrate new tools into our lives than about how simply to keep up...Newspapers go online less because they want to than because they think they have to—and with largely disastrous results. Likewise, elementary school boards adopt “laptop” curriculums less because they believe that they’ll teach better than because they fear their students will miss out on something if they don’t. We feel proud that we’re willing to do or spend whatever it takes to use this stuff—with little regard to how it actually impacts our lives.”
We are headed to a world where we extend human agency through external tools that can think independent of us: “The strategies we have developed to cope with new mediating technologies in the past will no longer serve us—however similar in shape the computing revolution may appear to previous reckonings with future shock. For instance, the unease pondering what it might mean to have some of our thinking done out of body by an external device is arguably just a computer-era version of the challenges to self-image or “proprioception” posed by industrial machinery. The industrial age challenged us to rethink the limits of the human body: Where does my body end and the tool begin? The digital age challenges us to rethink the limits of the human mind: What are the boundaries of my cognition? And while machines once replaced and usurped the value of human labor, computers and networks do more than usurp the value of human thought. They not only copy our intellectual processes—our repeatable programs—but they also discourage our more complex processes—our higher order cognition, contemplation, innovation, and meaning making that should be the reward of “outsourcing” our arithmetic to silicon chips in the first place.”
How to get on top of situation is to have a solid understanding and say in how these devices are designed or programmed. Hence the need to program or be programmed: “Back in the earliest days of personal computing, we may not have understood how our calculators worked, but we understood exactly what they were doing for us: adding one number to another, finding a square root, and so on. With computers and networks, unlike our calculators, we don’t even know what we are asking our machines to do, much less how they are going to go about doing it. Every Google search is—at least for most of us—a Hail Mary pass into the datasphere, requesting something from an opaque black box. How does it know what is relevant? How is it making its decisions? Why can’t the corporation in charge tell us? And we have too little time to consider the consequences of not knowing everything we might like to about our machines. As our own obsolescence looms, we continue to accept new technologies into our lives with little or no understanding of how these devices work and work on us. We do not know how to program our computers, nor do we care. We spend much more time and energy trying to figure out how to use them to program one another instead. And this is potentially a grave mistake.”
We are hurtled forward on this technological tsunami and in danger of losing meaning if we don’t stop and develop a new template to guide us: “No matter the breadth of its capabilities, the net will not bestow upon humans the fuel or space we need to wrestle with its implications and their meaning. We are aware of the many problems engendered by the digital era. What is called for now is a human response to the evolution of these technologies all around us. We are living in a different world than the one we grew up in—one even more profoundly different than the world of the alphabet was from the oral society that existed for millennia before it. That changing society codified what was happening to it through the Torah and eventually the Talmud, preparing people to live in a textual age. Like they did, we need to codify the changes we are undergoing, and develop a new ethical, behavioral, and business template through which to guide us. Only this time it must actually work. We are living through a real shift—one that has already crashed our economy twice, changed the way we educate and entertain ourselves, and altered the very fabric of human relationships. Yet, so far, we have very little understanding of what is happening to us and how to cope. Most of the smart folks who could help us are too busy consulting to corporations—teaching them how to maintain their faltering monopolies in the face of the digital tsunami. Who has time to consider much else, and who is going to pay for it?”
There are many biases (tendencies to think or lean a certain way) and in the digital age those biases must be deliberately reviewed and consciously adopted, modified, or rejected: “It may be true that “guns don’t kill people, people kill people”; but guns are a technology more biased to killing than, say, clock radios. Televisions are biased toward people sitting still in couches and watching. Automobiles are biased toward motion, individuality, and living in the suburbs. Oral culture is biased toward communicating in person, while written culture is biased toward communication that doesn’t happen between people in the same time and place. Film photography and its expensive processes were biased toward scarcity, while digital photography is biased toward immediate and widespread distribution. Some cameras even upload photos to websites automatically, turning the click of the shutter into an act of global publishing. To most of us, though, that “click” still feels the same, even though the results are very different. We can’t quite feel the biases shifting as we move from technology to technology, or task to task. Writing an email is not the same as writing a letter, and sending a message through a social networking service is not the same as writing an email. Each of the acts not only yields different results, but demands different mind-sets and approaches from us. Just as we think and behave differently in different settings, we think and behave differently when operating different technology. Only by understanding the biases of the media through which we engage with the world can we differentiate between what we intend, and what the machines we’re using intend for us—whether they or their programmers even know it.”
April 3, 2011
I'm not sure what I expected of this book, but it was less technical then I thought it was going to be. It is a quick read with a number of thoughtful anecdotes. Some of the "commands" seemed like etiquette lessons for a digital age, but overall I thought the book was insightful.
I found the last two commands, Openness and Purpose, the most interesting. If his motivation for writing this book was to spark more of an interest in programming he has succeeded with me!
One of his strongest points was, "...while Renaissance kings maintained their monopoly over the printing presses by force, today's elite is depending on little more than our own disinterest." He explains that learning the basics of programming is not as difficult as most people expect. Once you gain a better understanding you would have a different perspective when interacting with digital technologies.
The essential reading list at the end of the book also offers some good references to dig deeper into this topic. This book just scratches the surface, and I feel motivated to learn more.
I found the last two commands, Openness and Purpose, the most interesting. If his motivation for writing this book was to spark more of an interest in programming he has succeeded with me!
One of his strongest points was, "...while Renaissance kings maintained their monopoly over the printing presses by force, today's elite is depending on little more than our own disinterest." He explains that learning the basics of programming is not as difficult as most people expect. Once you gain a better understanding you would have a different perspective when interacting with digital technologies.
The essential reading list at the end of the book also offers some good references to dig deeper into this topic. This book just scratches the surface, and I feel motivated to learn more.
December 13, 2011
Right from the first page, Douglas Rushkoff's book Program or Be Programmed reminded me of Nicholas Carr's, The Shallows [1] -- only with a broader scope and more buzzwords and a less gloomy appraisal of the subject. I read The Shallows last year, and though it was interesting, it was also overly dramatic, and was too timid in its speculations -- and thus it failed to draw fully-baked conclusions or make substantive predictions. We walk away with Carr's Neural Doomsday:
The price we pay to assume technology's power is alienation.
Rushkoff dives into a lot of the same territory as Carr. They both discuss (and not wholly favorably) the optimistic futurists that long for the infinite memory of their "outboard brain[s]", those same futurists that assume that our cybernetic evolution will (through technology) give us powers that are indistinguishable from telepathy. On the flip of super-human memory and super-human emotion/intelligence-sharing, both Carr and Rushkoff talk about the flavor of hyper-facile "breadth-only/depth-never" searches that are encouraged by the very design of systems like Google and Wikipedia. This is where we start to see differences in their approaches to the subject though: Carr sees us as being "reprogrammed" by those systems to think in a specific and narrow way; meanwhile, Rushkoff points to those systems and says that what's happening is us bending to the bias of the machine, instead of taking advantage of those machine biases to do for us what is otherwise difficult or repetitive or time-consuming. Rushkoff's argument is similar to Carr's but subtly and importantly different -- he is not quick to cast off these powerful and seductive tools, but instead urges us to remember that they are simply a means through which to achieve our ultimate goals, which are really about meaningful contact with other human beings. If going head-to-head, I'm sure that Carr would cite McLuhan and accuse Rushkoff of making David Sarnoff's argument, placing all of the blame on the consumer. On the surface, this would seem true; after all, isn't Rushkoff imploring us in the title to take control by learning the fundamental means of production for digital content?
As I disagreed with Carr on this before, I disagree with him now. Rushkoff is not naïve in invoking neuroplasticity [2] here. He wisely points out that the reason we assume the shape of "the machine's" biases is because it is convenient to do so, and in large part it is convenient because the masters of those machines have made it that way. Rushkoff cites how American pedagogy looks at computer literacy through the lens of usage and consumption -- "how do you enter data into last year's version of Excel?" instead of "how would you go about designing a data aggregation and analytics engine on your own?" Rushkoff goes beyond that to point out that even the language around the simple act of installing software ("the Wizard" in Windows) is constructed to mystify and obfuscate it behind abstractions -- and that is to say nothing of the mechanism itself. He does not damn all creators of software [3], but he does point the finger in that direction. So what Rushkoff is saying is not that those machine biases are bad [4] -- but that our approach to learning and interacting with those systems is flawed, and in part that is an incidental conspiracy on the part of those creators to feed what they want into those systems. But... re-enter neuroplasticity -- the brain mechanism that causes us to take the shape of those machine biases is also the same one responsible for the kind of technological re-appropriation that William Gibson often talks about [5] -- and that's enough of an argument to say that we can and often do "snap out of it" and shape the tools to our desires and needs.
That technological re-appropriation is in the spirit of the type of New Media Literacy that Rushkoff would have us learn, and which Carr seems to mention only obliquely and incompletely and perhaps a bit timorously. To Rushkoff, "the new literacy" -- as mentioned above -- is woefully insufficient. Learning "spreadsheet skills" [6] like data-entry and copy/paste and sorting/filtering is ultimately just cranking out more consumers (albeit spreadsheet consumers) and is not encouraging creativity or even thoughtfulness. As a consequence, the lessons learned for our un-fun software become the same lessons for our fun/social [7] software -- we graze from them, we engage shallowly with those systems, and since we use those systems to mediate our social connections, then those interactions become increasingly shallow as well.
Once again, we have Rushkoff's theses dovetailing with Carr's. They both assert that taking the shape of the machine's bias puts you at a disadvantage, that you wind up fetishizing the gadgets themselves instead of putting them to work for you. But Carr offers us his ditch-digger analogy [8] and stops coyly and obliquely short -- abstaining from any speculation on how we might save ourselves. Meanwhile, Rushkoff comes right out and delivers a proposed salvation in the form of an ultimatum: "Program or be programmed." [9] But that ultimatum is just a stand-in or metaphor for something else: "Think, synthesize, and create -- don't just consume."
There is a great deal more than just the above going on Rushkoff's book. I've focused on these items because it makes a great (and significantly more positive) companion piece to Nicholas Carr's book. [10] But Rushkoff discusses more than just "machine biases" and "spreadsheet skills"; he talks about identity and anonymity, about factuality and openness, about nuance... He talks coherently and passionately about a great many things in the span of 150 pages. [11] And he delivers these points in such a way that anyone can read them, that anyone can process them and act on them. He wants you to act on these "commands". And for all of my minor criticisms [12], I would want you to read and act on these "commands" as well.
---
1: My review is here on Goodreads.
2: Carr also invokes neuroplasticity in his text, but he sees it as dooming us to forever mutate into impulse-driven click-hungry meat-terminals for machine masters. (Okay, that is maybe going a little too far into what I perceive to be the spirit of his text...)
3: Mostly Rushkoff is just damning the commercial creators. He seems to have kind words for free/open source software (FOSS) developers, and the FOSS movement on the whole. And/but that said, I was a little surprised that he didn't jump in and link this "abstractions" business up with how developers are (by and large) lazy -- inasmuch as "lazy" developers are "lazy" because they are not interested in re-solving solved problems unless those problems are worth re-solving. (Did that make sense?)
4: In a way, he argues that these biases are essential -- that the machines are designed to compensate for things that we (as human beings) do not do well, and/or do not like to do.
5: Check out William Gibson's remarks about pagers in this interview in The Paris Review.
6: My term, not his -- though I wish it was his.
7: Though I almost didn't stick "social" in there, since Rushkoff believes that all software is social, since "the point" of all software is to connect users to other users, people to other people, to enable sharing between them and strengthen social bonds. Like the digital equivalent of primates grooming each other?
8: In case you didn't read it yourself, I'll summarize the ditch-digger analogy as follows: "Is it better to dig a longer and wider ditch in half the time with your steam shovel if it means that your muscles atrophy as a consequence?"
9: Although, let's be honest here -- there isn't much real/actual discussion of programming until the very end of the text. And even then, it's only really few pages in the last chapter and then a page or two of references in the bibliography.
10: ...which I recommend despite despising it.
11: Screw it, here are the ten "commands" from the table of contents:
(1) Time - do not be always on
(2) Place - live in person
(3) Choice - you may always choose none of the above
(4) Complexity - you are never completely right
(5) Scale - one size does not fit all
(6) Identity - be yourself
(7) Social - do not sell your friends
(8) Fact - tell the truth
(9) Openness - share, don't steal
(10) Purpose - program or be programmed
And as a brief side note there: after reading the chapter on "Choice", I felt surprised that Rushkoff's "Essential Reading" section did not include Sheena Iyengar's The Art of Choosing . But I suppose that they did come out at about the same time...
12: And there were a few... I could have done without some of the lurid buzz-wordy passages; and they could have done another editorial pass (some of the sentences seemed to be missing... an important verb or two); and he sometimes flubbed certain scientific elements... but it's all water under the bridge in light of his central thesis and commitment to the subject matter.
January 20, 2021
Program or Be Programmed has some serious "Old man yells at cloud" energy, and you know, that's fine, understandable even - every now and then I was totally willing to yell at the clouds with him, but aside from those moments, this book is... questionable. Now, I am aware that it was written and published in 2010, but not all of his takes just aged badly, some of them were awful to begin with.
The Good
Rushkoff rightly identifies many of the issues that plague society and its individuals in this era of technology. Small businesses are falling prey to giant online retailers, consumers have become the product, online anonymity brings out the worst in people, the stealing of all things ranging from intellectual property to personal data has become commonplace, we are often neglecting the here and now in favor of doing things on our phone, the constant onslaught of terror, violence, war, death, catastrophe that we're exposed to day after day is desensitizing us, and the nature of the internet is dividing and polarizing us.
The Bad
The whole premise, as can be deduced by the title and the book's last chapter, is that we should all learn how to program. I disagree. Can everyone learn how to program? In theory I'd say yes. It's possible. Should everyone learn to program? Definitely not. Learning to program beyond letting the computer print "Hello, World" in X programming language or stringing some HTML tags together takes time. A LOT of time. And that is what most people at this point in time don't have enough of, nor should they make the time to spend hundreds of hours learning how to program! Yes, having a general understanding of how the tech you use works, what it can do and what it does without you even knowing is incredibly important, but (as even Rushkoff concedes in the very last paragraph of the book) you don't need to be able to program to understand the gist of things. Using programs that someone else wrote isn't bad. It's a GOOD thing! Especially if you take the time to understand how they work.
The Ugly
No, Rushkoff, young people in 2010 did not "see the human species evolving toward a more collective awareness, [...] where we all know each other's thoughts through telepathy." (he mentions this supposed "development" twice even)
Rushkoff has no clue what a meme is. I was a teen on the internet in 2010 so trust me on this one - a meme is not just "an idea that spreads". "And since big companies, nations, and organizations generally produce things that affect a lot of people, the memes they release will tend to have more relevance and replicate better." I just... no. Do I have to say anything else?
"May the best meme win." Hi fellow kids.
"Imagine having to choose your college major before taking a single course." Oh no, how terrible, it's not like that's how it works in most countries that aren't America.
Aged like milk: "Likewise, Philip Rosedale - the quite sane founder of the virtual reality community Second Life - told me he believes that by 2020, his online world will be indistinguishable from real life." Lol.
The Good
Rushkoff rightly identifies many of the issues that plague society and its individuals in this era of technology. Small businesses are falling prey to giant online retailers, consumers have become the product, online anonymity brings out the worst in people, the stealing of all things ranging from intellectual property to personal data has become commonplace, we are often neglecting the here and now in favor of doing things on our phone, the constant onslaught of terror, violence, war, death, catastrophe that we're exposed to day after day is desensitizing us, and the nature of the internet is dividing and polarizing us.
The Bad
The whole premise, as can be deduced by the title and the book's last chapter, is that we should all learn how to program. I disagree. Can everyone learn how to program? In theory I'd say yes. It's possible. Should everyone learn to program? Definitely not. Learning to program beyond letting the computer print "Hello, World" in X programming language or stringing some HTML tags together takes time. A LOT of time. And that is what most people at this point in time don't have enough of, nor should they make the time to spend hundreds of hours learning how to program! Yes, having a general understanding of how the tech you use works, what it can do and what it does without you even knowing is incredibly important, but (as even Rushkoff concedes in the very last paragraph of the book) you don't need to be able to program to understand the gist of things. Using programs that someone else wrote isn't bad. It's a GOOD thing! Especially if you take the time to understand how they work.
The Ugly
No, Rushkoff, young people in 2010 did not "see the human species evolving toward a more collective awareness, [...] where we all know each other's thoughts through telepathy." (he mentions this supposed "development" twice even)
Rushkoff has no clue what a meme is. I was a teen on the internet in 2010 so trust me on this one - a meme is not just "an idea that spreads". "And since big companies, nations, and organizations generally produce things that affect a lot of people, the memes they release will tend to have more relevance and replicate better." I just... no. Do I have to say anything else?
"May the best meme win." Hi fellow kids.
"Imagine having to choose your college major before taking a single course." Oh no, how terrible, it's not like that's how it works in most countries that aren't America.
Aged like milk: "Likewise, Philip Rosedale - the quite sane founder of the virtual reality community Second Life - told me he believes that by 2020, his online world will be indistinguishable from real life." Lol.
December 16, 2017
As someone who is primarily interested in social media’s influence on us, the chapters ‘Time’ (Do not always be on), ‘Place’ (Live in person) and ‘Complexity’ (You are never completely right) really struck a chord. However, I found the other chapters thought provoking for aspects of the digital age that I haven’t much explored or thought about.
However I take issue with Rushkoff’s main point: Learn coding to throw off the shackles of the oppressor and shape the narrative of the digital age to best suit your needs. Progress from user/consumer of technology to hacker/coder.
However, I’m not convinced that we know what our ‘needs’ are or how to achieve them using this technology. And so for me this distinction is not so radical. I will simply transition from having a technology done ‘on’ me of indeterminate impact on my wellbeing, to ‘doing’ a technology myself of indeterminate impact on my wellbeing. But I suppose that is a step forward.
However I take issue with Rushkoff’s main point: Learn coding to throw off the shackles of the oppressor and shape the narrative of the digital age to best suit your needs. Progress from user/consumer of technology to hacker/coder.
However, I’m not convinced that we know what our ‘needs’ are or how to achieve them using this technology. And so for me this distinction is not so radical. I will simply transition from having a technology done ‘on’ me of indeterminate impact on my wellbeing, to ‘doing’ a technology myself of indeterminate impact on my wellbeing. But I suppose that is a step forward.
September 6, 2012
In this book Douglas Rushkoff not only discusses what it means to be a participant in this new, fast-paced digital world, but he also outlines ten rules (or "commandments" as he calls them) for for us to use so we don't get swept off our feet in media streams. Rushkoff takes his time delving into the possible repercussions of Time, Place, Choice, Complexity, Scale, Identity, Social, Fact, Openness, and Purpose.
Rushkoff begins his chapter by defining what he calls the "computer biases" concerning each of the ten aspects of dealing with digital media. With Place, for example, "digital media are biased away from the local, and toward dislocation." He then discusses both the benefits and disadvantages of each of the computer biases.
I really like Rushkoff's style of discussing each of the ten commandments of digital media. I appreciate how he presents both the good and bad in each aspect. I think a lot of people become one sided in the debate over the how good/bad the Internet is for its users, but Rushkoff tries to steer clear of that. Rather, he invests his time in trying to help readers understand how to stay on top of digital media so they don't become overwhelmed. There are times when his reasoning becomes convoluted, but his tone stays very upbeat and engaging.
Rushkoff begins his chapter by defining what he calls the "computer biases" concerning each of the ten aspects of dealing with digital media. With Place, for example, "digital media are biased away from the local, and toward dislocation." He then discusses both the benefits and disadvantages of each of the computer biases.
I really like Rushkoff's style of discussing each of the ten commandments of digital media. I appreciate how he presents both the good and bad in each aspect. I think a lot of people become one sided in the debate over the how good/bad the Internet is for its users, but Rushkoff tries to steer clear of that. Rather, he invests his time in trying to help readers understand how to stay on top of digital media so they don't become overwhelmed. There are times when his reasoning becomes convoluted, but his tone stays very upbeat and engaging.
July 3, 2011
First of all, I had to read this book for a communications course and I wasn't expecting to enjoy it, so perhaps I was already biased. (I did love the course, though, so maybe that evens it out? Oh well, irrelevant.)
Overall, I thought that Rushkoff made his point in each chapter within just a few sentences, and the rest was all just fluff. He seemed to write the same things over and over again, just using different words. The book wasn't long by any means, but it definitely could have been much shorter and nothing important would've been lost. Additionally, I felt that his ideas were nothing new, and I remember thinking that only a few of his "Ten Commands" were actually applicable or at all useful.
The book provided for interesting class discussions, however, so that's why I gave it the second star. If not for the book, the great discussions wouldn't have occurred, so there's my reasoning. Otherwise, Program or Be Programmed would only have received one star from me. I didn't hate it. I'm indifferent about it, and that's why Program or Be Programmed deserves one star: it couldn't stir up ANY reaction in me whatsoever.
Overall, I thought that Rushkoff made his point in each chapter within just a few sentences, and the rest was all just fluff. He seemed to write the same things over and over again, just using different words. The book wasn't long by any means, but it definitely could have been much shorter and nothing important would've been lost. Additionally, I felt that his ideas were nothing new, and I remember thinking that only a few of his "Ten Commands" were actually applicable or at all useful.
The book provided for interesting class discussions, however, so that's why I gave it the second star. If not for the book, the great discussions wouldn't have occurred, so there's my reasoning. Otherwise, Program or Be Programmed would only have received one star from me. I didn't hate it. I'm indifferent about it, and that's why Program or Be Programmed deserves one star: it couldn't stir up ANY reaction in me whatsoever.
January 2, 2012
Dear God this is an awful book: obvious, tedious, puffed up with empty words and self-importance. If "Ten Commands for a Digital Age" sounds like the title of a blog post to you, that's because it should have been one: there's just about enough ideas and specific examples here to sustain a longish blog post, no more.
Reading this short-but-not-short-enough book in its entirety has been like chewing through a loaf of damp white-bread trying to get to one tasty chocolate chip buried in the middle. I think I only did it for the somewhat novel experience of plowing through and finishing such a relentlessly windy book when all my instincts were telling me to put it down forever.
If you want a short read that addresses similar topics in a far livelier fashion, try In the Beginning...was the Command Line. Although out-of-date compared with Rushkoff, Stephenson doesn't waste words and he doesn't dumb down his material; you might actually learn something from him.
Reading this short-but-not-short-enough book in its entirety has been like chewing through a loaf of damp white-bread trying to get to one tasty chocolate chip buried in the middle. I think I only did it for the somewhat novel experience of plowing through and finishing such a relentlessly windy book when all my instincts were telling me to put it down forever.
If you want a short read that addresses similar topics in a far livelier fashion, try In the Beginning...was the Command Line. Although out-of-date compared with Rushkoff, Stephenson doesn't waste words and he doesn't dumb down his material; you might actually learn something from him.
Want to read
January 5, 2023 Let us be clear Rushkoff is no crackpot he is degreed, learned, and thoughtful (his bio - http://www.rushkoff.com/about/). He definitively makes the argument that the debate over the societal value of the internet and technology is irrelevant (he states the obvious, “it is here to stay so move on,” in such a way that should convince even the spiritual descendants of the Luddites), Rushkoff raises the more important question of do we direct technology or be controlled by those who master technology and the technology itself? “Choose the former, and you gain access to the control panel of civilization. Choose the latter, and it could be the last real choice you get to make.” A bit dire and seemingly over dramatic, Rushkoff proceeds to develop a well argued position that indeed we are not looking at the opportunity with enough self awareness. There are a number of substantial points that Rushkoff discusses and actually calls out in an article that I found to be just as benefical as the book for those that don’t have the desire or time to read the book
April 22, 2017
Insightful and deep reflection on the way we could/should evolve our behaviour to maintain control of the digital evolution. The principles are here, but read the book:
TIME — Do Not Be “Always On”
PLACE — Live in Person
CHOICE — You May Always Choose “None of the Above”
COMPLEXITY — You Are Never Completely Right
SCALE — One Size Does Not Fit All
IDENTITY — Be Yourself
SOCIAL — Do Not Sell Your Friends
FACT — Tell the Truth
OPENNESS — Share, Don’t Steal
PURPOSE — Program or Be Programmed
TIME — Do Not Be “Always On”
PLACE — Live in Person
CHOICE — You May Always Choose “None of the Above”
COMPLEXITY — You Are Never Completely Right
SCALE — One Size Does Not Fit All
IDENTITY — Be Yourself
SOCIAL — Do Not Sell Your Friends
FACT — Tell the Truth
OPENNESS — Share, Don’t Steal
PURPOSE — Program or Be Programmed
June 1, 2014
Not so much a treatise on coding, more a sociological examination of the effects of the internet.
Here are some quotes:
Political organizers who believed the Internet would consolidate their constituencies find that net petitions and self-referential blogging now serve as substitutes for action.
A news media that saw in information networks new opportunities for citizen journalism and responsive, twenty-four-hour news gathering has grown sensationalist, unprofitable, and devoid of useful facts.
[T]he loud and lewd drown out anything that takes more than a few moments to understand.
[T]he underlying capability of the computer era is actually programming—which almost none of us knows how to do.
The people hear while the rabbis read; the people read while those with access to the printing press write; today we write, while our techno-elite programs. As a result, most of society remains one full dimensional leap of awareness and capability behind the few who manage to monopolize access to the real power of any media age.
We don’t celebrate the human stars of this medium, the way we marveled at the stars of radio, film, or television; we are mesmerized instead by the screens and touchpads themselves.
Instead of pursuing new abilities, we fetishize new toys.
The beauty of the early net was its timelessness. Conversations took place on bulletin boards over periods of weeks or months. ...If anything, because our conversations were asynchronous, we had the luxury of deeply considering what we said.
No matter how proficient we think we are at multitasking, studies show our ability to accomplish tasks accurately and completely only diminishes the more we try to do at the same time.
We have no time to make considered responses, feeling instead obligated to reply to every incoming message on impulse.
Every answered email spawns more. The quicker we respond, the more of an expectation we create that we will respond that rapidly again... The slower we respond—the more we do the net on our own schedule instead of the one we think it is imposing on us—the more respect we command from the people on the other side of the screen.
Of course, the simplest way out is to refuse to be always on.
The processes we used to use for finding a doctor or a friend, mapping a route, or choosing a restaurant are being replaced by machines that may, in fact, do it better. What we lose in the bargain, however, is not just the ability to remember certain facts, but to call upon certain skills.
So instead of simply offloading our memory to external hard drives, we’re beginning to offload our thinking as well.
She relates to her friends through the network, while practically ignoring whomever she is with at the moment.
We can watch live feed of the oil from an underwater well leaking into the ocean, or a cell phone video of an activist getting murdered in the street by a dictator’s police. But with little more to do about it than blog from the safety of our bedrooms, such imagery tends to disconnect and desensitize us rather than engage us fully.
[E]arly tests of analog recordings compared to digital ones revealed that music played back on a CD format had much less of a positive impact on depressed patients than the same recording played back on a record.
We... get into trouble if we equate such cherry-picked knowledge with the kind one gets pursuing a genuine inquiry.
Both sides in a debate can cherry-pick the facts that suit them—enraging their constituencies and polarizing everybody.
Instead of learning about our technology, we opt for a world in which our technology learns about us.
[N]ew and disturbing studies in Germany have shown young people raised on MP3s can no longer distinguish between the several hundred thousand musical sounds their parents can hear.
The less we take responsibility for what we say and do online, the more likely we are to behave in ways that reflect our worst natures—or even the worst natures of others. Because digital technology is biased toward depersonalization, we must make an effort not to operate anonymously, unless absolutely necessary.
[O]ur digital behaviors closely mirror those of Asperger’s sufferers: a dependence on the verbal over the visual, low pickup on social cues and facial expressions, apparent lack of empathy, and the inability to make eye contact. This describes any of us online, typing to one another, commonly misunderstanding each other’s messages, insulting one another unintentionally...
[O]nly 7 percent of human communication occurs on the verbal level. Pitch, volume, and other vocal tone account for 38 percent, and body movements such as gestures and facial expression account for a whopping 55 percent. As we have all experienced, the way a person makes eye contact can mean a whole lot more to us than whatever he is saying. But online, we are depending entirely on that tiny 7 percent of what we use in the real world. Absent the cues on which we usually depend to feel safe, establish rapport, or show agreement, we are left to wonder what the person on the other end really means or really thinks of us. Our mirror neurons—the parts of our brains that enjoy and are reinforced by seeing someone nod or smile while we are sharing something—remain mute. The dopamine we expect to be released when someone agrees with us doesn’t flow. We remain in the suspicious, protective crouch, even when the situation would warrant otherwise—if only we were actually there.
Finally, after a series of violations by small businesses looking to promote their services online, the net was opened for commercial use.
Our digital networks are biased toward social connections—toward contact. Any effort to redefine or hijack those connections for profit end up compromising the integrity of the network itself, and compromising the real promise of contact. People are able to sense when a social network is really serving some other purpose.
The anger people feel over a social networking site’s ever-changing policies really has less to do with any invasion of their privacy than the monetization of their friendships. The information gleaned from their activity is being used for other than social purposes—and this feels creepy. Friends are not bought and sold.
Content was never king, contact is.
Just as a species can get stronger through natural selection of genes, a society gets stronger through the natural selection of memes.
By learning the difference between sharing and stealing, we can promote openness without succumbing to selfishness.
[T]he fact that we can copy and distribute anything that anybody does, does not make it right.
Value is still being extracted from the work—it’s just being taken from a different place in the production cycle, and not passed down to the creators themselves.
And so it goes, all the while being characterized as the new openness of a digital society, when in fact we are less open to one another than we are to exploitation from the usual suspects at the top of the traditional food chain.
The people on the other side of the screen spent time and energy on the things we read and watch.
America, the country that once put men on the moon, is now falling behind most developed and many developing nations in computer education. We do not teach programming in most public schools. Instead of teaching programming, most schools with computer literacy curriculums teach programs.
Meanwhile, kids in other countries—from China to Iran—aren’t wasting their time learning how to use off-the-shelf commercial software packages. They are finding out how computers work. They learn computer languages, they write software and, yes, some of them are even taught the cryptography and other skills they need to breach Western cyber-security measures... it’s just a matter of a generation before they’ve surpassed us.
Programming is the sweet spot, the high leverage point in a digital society. If we don’t learn to program, we risk being programmed ourselves.
The irony here is that computers are frightfully easy to learn. Programming is immensely powerful, but it is really no big deal to learn.
For the person who understands code, the whole world reveals itself as a series of decisions made by planners and designers for how the rest of us should live.
Fully open and customizable operating systems, like Linux, are much more secure than closed ones such as Microsoft Windows. In fact, the back doors that commercial operating systems leave for potential vendors and consumer research have made them more vulnerable to attack than their open source counterparts.
Finally, we have the tools to program. Yet we are content to seize only the capability of the last great media renaissance, that of writing.
But while Renaissance kings maintained their monopoly over the printing presses by force, today’s elite is depending on little more than our own disinterest.
In the long term, if we take up this challenge, we are looking at nothing less than the conscious, collective intervention of human beings in their own evolution.
[T]he more humans become involved in their design, the more humanely inspired these tools will end up behaving.
Even if we don’t all go out and learn to program—something any high school student can do with a decent paperback on the subject and a couple of weeks of effort—we must at least learn and contend with the essential biases of the technologies we will be living and working with from here on.
Here are some quotes:
Political organizers who believed the Internet would consolidate their constituencies find that net petitions and self-referential blogging now serve as substitutes for action.
A news media that saw in information networks new opportunities for citizen journalism and responsive, twenty-four-hour news gathering has grown sensationalist, unprofitable, and devoid of useful facts.
[T]he loud and lewd drown out anything that takes more than a few moments to understand.
[T]he underlying capability of the computer era is actually programming—which almost none of us knows how to do.
The people hear while the rabbis read; the people read while those with access to the printing press write; today we write, while our techno-elite programs. As a result, most of society remains one full dimensional leap of awareness and capability behind the few who manage to monopolize access to the real power of any media age.
We don’t celebrate the human stars of this medium, the way we marveled at the stars of radio, film, or television; we are mesmerized instead by the screens and touchpads themselves.
Instead of pursuing new abilities, we fetishize new toys.
The beauty of the early net was its timelessness. Conversations took place on bulletin boards over periods of weeks or months. ...If anything, because our conversations were asynchronous, we had the luxury of deeply considering what we said.
No matter how proficient we think we are at multitasking, studies show our ability to accomplish tasks accurately and completely only diminishes the more we try to do at the same time.
We have no time to make considered responses, feeling instead obligated to reply to every incoming message on impulse.
Every answered email spawns more. The quicker we respond, the more of an expectation we create that we will respond that rapidly again... The slower we respond—the more we do the net on our own schedule instead of the one we think it is imposing on us—the more respect we command from the people on the other side of the screen.
Of course, the simplest way out is to refuse to be always on.
The processes we used to use for finding a doctor or a friend, mapping a route, or choosing a restaurant are being replaced by machines that may, in fact, do it better. What we lose in the bargain, however, is not just the ability to remember certain facts, but to call upon certain skills.
So instead of simply offloading our memory to external hard drives, we’re beginning to offload our thinking as well.
She relates to her friends through the network, while practically ignoring whomever she is with at the moment.
We can watch live feed of the oil from an underwater well leaking into the ocean, or a cell phone video of an activist getting murdered in the street by a dictator’s police. But with little more to do about it than blog from the safety of our bedrooms, such imagery tends to disconnect and desensitize us rather than engage us fully.
[E]arly tests of analog recordings compared to digital ones revealed that music played back on a CD format had much less of a positive impact on depressed patients than the same recording played back on a record.
We... get into trouble if we equate such cherry-picked knowledge with the kind one gets pursuing a genuine inquiry.
Both sides in a debate can cherry-pick the facts that suit them—enraging their constituencies and polarizing everybody.
Instead of learning about our technology, we opt for a world in which our technology learns about us.
[N]ew and disturbing studies in Germany have shown young people raised on MP3s can no longer distinguish between the several hundred thousand musical sounds their parents can hear.
The less we take responsibility for what we say and do online, the more likely we are to behave in ways that reflect our worst natures—or even the worst natures of others. Because digital technology is biased toward depersonalization, we must make an effort not to operate anonymously, unless absolutely necessary.
[O]ur digital behaviors closely mirror those of Asperger’s sufferers: a dependence on the verbal over the visual, low pickup on social cues and facial expressions, apparent lack of empathy, and the inability to make eye contact. This describes any of us online, typing to one another, commonly misunderstanding each other’s messages, insulting one another unintentionally...
[O]nly 7 percent of human communication occurs on the verbal level. Pitch, volume, and other vocal tone account for 38 percent, and body movements such as gestures and facial expression account for a whopping 55 percent. As we have all experienced, the way a person makes eye contact can mean a whole lot more to us than whatever he is saying. But online, we are depending entirely on that tiny 7 percent of what we use in the real world. Absent the cues on which we usually depend to feel safe, establish rapport, or show agreement, we are left to wonder what the person on the other end really means or really thinks of us. Our mirror neurons—the parts of our brains that enjoy and are reinforced by seeing someone nod or smile while we are sharing something—remain mute. The dopamine we expect to be released when someone agrees with us doesn’t flow. We remain in the suspicious, protective crouch, even when the situation would warrant otherwise—if only we were actually there.
Finally, after a series of violations by small businesses looking to promote their services online, the net was opened for commercial use.
Our digital networks are biased toward social connections—toward contact. Any effort to redefine or hijack those connections for profit end up compromising the integrity of the network itself, and compromising the real promise of contact. People are able to sense when a social network is really serving some other purpose.
The anger people feel over a social networking site’s ever-changing policies really has less to do with any invasion of their privacy than the monetization of their friendships. The information gleaned from their activity is being used for other than social purposes—and this feels creepy. Friends are not bought and sold.
Content was never king, contact is.
Just as a species can get stronger through natural selection of genes, a society gets stronger through the natural selection of memes.
By learning the difference between sharing and stealing, we can promote openness without succumbing to selfishness.
[T]he fact that we can copy and distribute anything that anybody does, does not make it right.
Value is still being extracted from the work—it’s just being taken from a different place in the production cycle, and not passed down to the creators themselves.
And so it goes, all the while being characterized as the new openness of a digital society, when in fact we are less open to one another than we are to exploitation from the usual suspects at the top of the traditional food chain.
The people on the other side of the screen spent time and energy on the things we read and watch.
America, the country that once put men on the moon, is now falling behind most developed and many developing nations in computer education. We do not teach programming in most public schools. Instead of teaching programming, most schools with computer literacy curriculums teach programs.
Meanwhile, kids in other countries—from China to Iran—aren’t wasting their time learning how to use off-the-shelf commercial software packages. They are finding out how computers work. They learn computer languages, they write software and, yes, some of them are even taught the cryptography and other skills they need to breach Western cyber-security measures... it’s just a matter of a generation before they’ve surpassed us.
Programming is the sweet spot, the high leverage point in a digital society. If we don’t learn to program, we risk being programmed ourselves.
The irony here is that computers are frightfully easy to learn. Programming is immensely powerful, but it is really no big deal to learn.
For the person who understands code, the whole world reveals itself as a series of decisions made by planners and designers for how the rest of us should live.
Fully open and customizable operating systems, like Linux, are much more secure than closed ones such as Microsoft Windows. In fact, the back doors that commercial operating systems leave for potential vendors and consumer research have made them more vulnerable to attack than their open source counterparts.
Finally, we have the tools to program. Yet we are content to seize only the capability of the last great media renaissance, that of writing.
But while Renaissance kings maintained their monopoly over the printing presses by force, today’s elite is depending on little more than our own disinterest.
In the long term, if we take up this challenge, we are looking at nothing less than the conscious, collective intervention of human beings in their own evolution.
[T]he more humans become involved in their design, the more humanely inspired these tools will end up behaving.
Even if we don’t all go out and learn to program—something any high school student can do with a decent paperback on the subject and a couple of weeks of effort—we must at least learn and contend with the essential biases of the technologies we will be living and working with from here on.
October 15, 2020
This reads as an old man shaking his fist and denouncing the internet and technology (computers), except his points are well thought out and solid. There are downsides to the tools we use and reuse to create and recreate the media that is ingested. I believe it is both outdated and still relevant now, because technology has integrated so deeply and uniquely with our lives, despite learning nothing of how it was used before. when this book was being published, there was a push for access to the internet accessibility. now everyone has a smartphone and the internet in their pocket. ironically, I think people are programming now mote than before, with ifttt and other home services, and yet people still refuse to find better ways to compute. This book needs to be remade in a flashier way for people to listen, which is sad but necessary.
June 4, 2018
Such important ideas and insights in this little book. (Also many typos.) (Also the newer cover is much less hideous.)
February 7, 2017
Some really excellent considerations here, as we continue to move into the digital age.
January 2, 2013
I headed into Douglas Rushkoff's book expecting it to like it. I've read some of his writing and find I agree with some of his major ideas. As the title of the book implies, it centers around the idea that the more of our lives we place in the hands of technology, the more important it is that we understand how the underlying tech works, and if necessary, be capable of changing it.
However, I was quite disappointed with the book. While some of his ideas are along the right lines, he sort of circles around them without directly nailing most of them. Worse still, many of his analogies are broken
For example, he makes an analogy to automobiles, comparing ignorant users of tech to being passengers rather than drivers. I'd say a better analogy would be to say that it's more like drivers who know how an automobile works are more likely to make better use of the car, better able to converse with their mechanic, etc.
Other analogies are just plain wrong. For example, he compares digital audio to analog audio recording, making the point that digital is a quantized, and thus poor, copy of the original, while analog is an exact copy. However, analog recording is full of it's own errors and approximations. Ultimately BOTH are a copy of the original, each with their own flaws, thus 'going digital' doesn't necessarily cause a problem, and ultimately it's important to understand both.
More annoying still, is that he stretches many of his analogies too far, as many books tend to do.
Finally, he doesn't really offer a prescription of any kind. Unlike better works like Jonathan Zittrain's book, which at least attempt to offer some suggested tactics and possible solutions, Rushkoff's book just rants about the problems and doesn't offer any paths out for most of them.
I gave it 2 stars as it at least gets the problem statement right, but I'd recommend skipping it, or at the very least complementing with something like Zittrain's "The Future of the Internet"
However, I was quite disappointed with the book. While some of his ideas are along the right lines, he sort of circles around them without directly nailing most of them. Worse still, many of his analogies are broken
For example, he makes an analogy to automobiles, comparing ignorant users of tech to being passengers rather than drivers. I'd say a better analogy would be to say that it's more like drivers who know how an automobile works are more likely to make better use of the car, better able to converse with their mechanic, etc.
Other analogies are just plain wrong. For example, he compares digital audio to analog audio recording, making the point that digital is a quantized, and thus poor, copy of the original, while analog is an exact copy. However, analog recording is full of it's own errors and approximations. Ultimately BOTH are a copy of the original, each with their own flaws, thus 'going digital' doesn't necessarily cause a problem, and ultimately it's important to understand both.
More annoying still, is that he stretches many of his analogies too far, as many books tend to do.
Finally, he doesn't really offer a prescription of any kind. Unlike better works like Jonathan Zittrain's book, which at least attempt to offer some suggested tactics and possible solutions, Rushkoff's book just rants about the problems and doesn't offer any paths out for most of them.
I gave it 2 stars as it at least gets the problem statement right, but I'd recommend skipping it, or at the very least complementing with something like Zittrain's "The Future of the Internet"
June 25, 2019
Summary
Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age written by Douglas Rushkoff is a book that discusses whether the internet is good or bad. This book compares the difference between understanding or knowing how to create software and becoming software. Rushkoff says “ It’s really that simple: Program, or be programmed. Choose the former, and you gain access to the control panel of civilization. Choose the latter, and it could be the last real choice you get to make” (Rushkoff, 2010, Kindle Location 66). In his argument, he states that people who do not know how to program will be directed by those who know how to program.
He believes that programming is the new literacy of the digital age and everybody should learn how to program. He compares this new literacy to the media revolutions that happened in the past. He criticized that people usually adapt to new technology or literacies without understanding how they really work. Those who understand how it works become the elite. He thinks “The people hear while the rabbis read; the people read while those with access to the printing press write; today we write, while our techno-elite programs” (Rushkoff, 2010, Kindle Location 139).
The book includes ten commands that are based on the biases of digital media. Rushkoff talks about each command to help readers find a balance between the needs of real people living and working in both physical and virtual spaces. He states that “Only by understanding the biases of the media through which we engage with the world can we differentiate between what we intend, and what the machines we’re using intend for us—whether they or their programmers even know it” (Rushkoff, 2010, Kindle Location 223).
Those ten commands are:
Ⅰ. Time: Do Not Be Always On
Ⅱ. Place: Live in Person
Ⅲ. Choice: You May Always Choose None of the Above
Ⅳ. Complexity: You Are Never Completely Right
Ⅴ. Scale: One Size Does Not Fit All
Ⅵ. Identity: Be Yourself
Ⅶ. Social: Do Not Sell Your Friends
Ⅷ. Fact: Tell The Truth
Ⅸ. Openness: Share, Don’t Steal
Ⅹ. Purpose: Program or Be Programmed
In the last command, which gave the name to the book, the author shows that America is falling behind most developed or even developing countries. He suggests that we need to teach programming in public schools instead of programs like how to use a spreadsheet or word processing because “these basic skills may make them more employable for the entry-level cubicle jobs of today, but they will not help them adapt to the technologies of tomorrow” (Rushkoff, 2010, Kindle Location 1496). He argues that if we want to stay competitive economically and culturally, and have a strong military, we need to teach programming.
Critique
I agree with the author’s view that we need to teach programming in schools. He suggests that we should start teaching programming (Computer Science) in high school. I say, let’s start in kindergarten. This is a national issue that our daily life, economy and homeland security depend on.
Under the first command which is time, the author states that we have been consistently using our brain, less as hard drives and more as processors and putting our mental resources into active RAM. This statement aligns with the article I read on Independent. I agree that we are becoming better at searching online and retrieving the information we need for that moment such as finding an address or restaurant.
The author argues that the digital realm is biased toward choice, but he also expresses that when we make a choice we choose only one of the options that are available which is not the real freedom of choosing what we really want. For example, if we want to make a video call by using an app, we are forced to accept the terms and conditions that we usually do not read and give the app access to our media. The author suggests that we are always free to withhold choice, but this option is becoming harder and harder is you want to be on the internet.
The author states that reading became a process of elimination rather than deep engagement. When a complex topic is discussed on an online platform, most people overvalue their ideas even though they do not inform themselves well. I believe that this is an important issue for everyone on the internet and it creates a polarization. The book suggests that knowing that this is an issue, we should check the facts on other people’s comments on multiple sites which must be something everybody agrees on.
I think Rushkoff made a great job comparing the new literacy of today to the past events to help his readers to better understand where were are at right now and where we are heading to. For example; he says “The industrial age challenged us to rethink the limits of the human body: Where does my body end and the tool begin? The digital age challenges us to rethink the limits of the human mind: What are the boundaries of my cognition?” (Rushkoff, 2010, Kindle Location 173).
In general, this book gives advice on how to turn biases into our advantages in a practical way. Instead of fighting against the change, it talks about how to embrace the change in an effective way which is what I believe we should do. I found many things that resonated with me on a lot of levels and I believe anyone who is using the internet will find something resonates with them. Its language is simple and easy to follow. Some might think that Rushkoff is arguing over what is obvious to most, but I found it a nice and short book to remind ourselves why we need to learn how to program and how to make better choices on the internet.
Qualifications
Douglas Rushkoff is a Professor of Media Theory and Digital Economics at CUNY/Queens. He wrote many best selling and award-winning books on media, technology, and culture. Some of the books he wrote are Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity, Media Virus, and Present Shock. Besides writing books, Rushkoff hosts podcasts and appears in the New York Times and ABC News. One of the podcasts he hosts is the Digital Nation on Frontline, PBS. His long career and involvement in discussions on media, technology, and culture make him a qualified resource for this topic.
Resources
Rushkoff, Douglas. Program or Be Programmed. OR Books. Kindle Edition.
Christophhooton, H. (2015, May 13). Our attention span is now less than that of a goldfish. Retrieved June 19, 2019, from https://www.independent.co.uk/news/ science/our-attention-span-is-now-less-than-that-of-a-goldfish-microsoft-study-finds-10247553.html
Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age written by Douglas Rushkoff is a book that discusses whether the internet is good or bad. This book compares the difference between understanding or knowing how to create software and becoming software. Rushkoff says “ It’s really that simple: Program, or be programmed. Choose the former, and you gain access to the control panel of civilization. Choose the latter, and it could be the last real choice you get to make” (Rushkoff, 2010, Kindle Location 66). In his argument, he states that people who do not know how to program will be directed by those who know how to program.
He believes that programming is the new literacy of the digital age and everybody should learn how to program. He compares this new literacy to the media revolutions that happened in the past. He criticized that people usually adapt to new technology or literacies without understanding how they really work. Those who understand how it works become the elite. He thinks “The people hear while the rabbis read; the people read while those with access to the printing press write; today we write, while our techno-elite programs” (Rushkoff, 2010, Kindle Location 139).
The book includes ten commands that are based on the biases of digital media. Rushkoff talks about each command to help readers find a balance between the needs of real people living and working in both physical and virtual spaces. He states that “Only by understanding the biases of the media through which we engage with the world can we differentiate between what we intend, and what the machines we’re using intend for us—whether they or their programmers even know it” (Rushkoff, 2010, Kindle Location 223).
Those ten commands are:
Ⅰ. Time: Do Not Be Always On
Ⅱ. Place: Live in Person
Ⅲ. Choice: You May Always Choose None of the Above
Ⅳ. Complexity: You Are Never Completely Right
Ⅴ. Scale: One Size Does Not Fit All
Ⅵ. Identity: Be Yourself
Ⅶ. Social: Do Not Sell Your Friends
Ⅷ. Fact: Tell The Truth
Ⅸ. Openness: Share, Don’t Steal
Ⅹ. Purpose: Program or Be Programmed
In the last command, which gave the name to the book, the author shows that America is falling behind most developed or even developing countries. He suggests that we need to teach programming in public schools instead of programs like how to use a spreadsheet or word processing because “these basic skills may make them more employable for the entry-level cubicle jobs of today, but they will not help them adapt to the technologies of tomorrow” (Rushkoff, 2010, Kindle Location 1496). He argues that if we want to stay competitive economically and culturally, and have a strong military, we need to teach programming.
Critique
I agree with the author’s view that we need to teach programming in schools. He suggests that we should start teaching programming (Computer Science) in high school. I say, let’s start in kindergarten. This is a national issue that our daily life, economy and homeland security depend on.
Under the first command which is time, the author states that we have been consistently using our brain, less as hard drives and more as processors and putting our mental resources into active RAM. This statement aligns with the article I read on Independent. I agree that we are becoming better at searching online and retrieving the information we need for that moment such as finding an address or restaurant.
The author argues that the digital realm is biased toward choice, but he also expresses that when we make a choice we choose only one of the options that are available which is not the real freedom of choosing what we really want. For example, if we want to make a video call by using an app, we are forced to accept the terms and conditions that we usually do not read and give the app access to our media. The author suggests that we are always free to withhold choice, but this option is becoming harder and harder is you want to be on the internet.
The author states that reading became a process of elimination rather than deep engagement. When a complex topic is discussed on an online platform, most people overvalue their ideas even though they do not inform themselves well. I believe that this is an important issue for everyone on the internet and it creates a polarization. The book suggests that knowing that this is an issue, we should check the facts on other people’s comments on multiple sites which must be something everybody agrees on.
I think Rushkoff made a great job comparing the new literacy of today to the past events to help his readers to better understand where were are at right now and where we are heading to. For example; he says “The industrial age challenged us to rethink the limits of the human body: Where does my body end and the tool begin? The digital age challenges us to rethink the limits of the human mind: What are the boundaries of my cognition?” (Rushkoff, 2010, Kindle Location 173).
In general, this book gives advice on how to turn biases into our advantages in a practical way. Instead of fighting against the change, it talks about how to embrace the change in an effective way which is what I believe we should do. I found many things that resonated with me on a lot of levels and I believe anyone who is using the internet will find something resonates with them. Its language is simple and easy to follow. Some might think that Rushkoff is arguing over what is obvious to most, but I found it a nice and short book to remind ourselves why we need to learn how to program and how to make better choices on the internet.
Qualifications
Douglas Rushkoff is a Professor of Media Theory and Digital Economics at CUNY/Queens. He wrote many best selling and award-winning books on media, technology, and culture. Some of the books he wrote are Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity, Media Virus, and Present Shock. Besides writing books, Rushkoff hosts podcasts and appears in the New York Times and ABC News. One of the podcasts he hosts is the Digital Nation on Frontline, PBS. His long career and involvement in discussions on media, technology, and culture make him a qualified resource for this topic.
Resources
Rushkoff, Douglas. Program or Be Programmed. OR Books. Kindle Edition.
Christophhooton, H. (2015, May 13). Our attention span is now less than that of a goldfish. Retrieved June 19, 2019, from https://www.independent.co.uk/news/ science/our-attention-span-is-now-less-than-that-of-a-goldfish-microsoft-study-finds-10247553.html
November 22, 2012
Rushkoff gives a concise & accessible introduction to so many issues of our digital era, from filter bubbles to social media to copyright. The book offers several commandments for living a healthier life & taking advantage of computers. In sum, ways to make computers useful to you rather than bending to their will. It would make us a better society if everyone was forced to read it in junior high.
All of that said, I found some of Rushkoff's contentions a bit strained (the fact that binary data can be represented as series of 1s & 0s doesn't mean that computers, as opposed to the analog world, are somehow innately inclined to making choices). The first citations appear about halfway through the book, long after some of the most questionable statements. I'd be OK with just no citations–the book isn't academic & wouldn't be as effective if it was–but don't go halfway & cite some things while leaving so much unsupported. I also wished the last section, on actually learning programming, was better emphasized. The book is more oriented towards software use than software design; at least presenting a few fundamental concepts, like variables or control flow, might have helped explain the power & appeal of programming to the uninitiated, who are left only with vague adumbrations of what it means to code at the end of the book.
All of that said, I found some of Rushkoff's contentions a bit strained (the fact that binary data can be represented as series of 1s & 0s doesn't mean that computers, as opposed to the analog world, are somehow innately inclined to making choices). The first citations appear about halfway through the book, long after some of the most questionable statements. I'd be OK with just no citations–the book isn't academic & wouldn't be as effective if it was–but don't go halfway & cite some things while leaving so much unsupported. I also wished the last section, on actually learning programming, was better emphasized. The book is more oriented towards software use than software design; at least presenting a few fundamental concepts, like variables or control flow, might have helped explain the power & appeal of programming to the uninitiated, who are left only with vague adumbrations of what it means to code at the end of the book.
October 24, 2010
Highly recommended. A quick read, but thought-provoking.
I bought this book partially because I was interested in the way it was published. The author deliberately chose to publish with a small, independent publisher and to sell the book through the publisher's website only. He promoted it through Boing Boing and other sites. The price was a bit steep for such a small book, but I was happy to know that more of the money was going to the creator and an independent business, rather than a big corporation.
The book describes ten rules for owning, rather being owned, by the new digital world that we find ourselves in. The final rule is to learn how to program, lest we become owned by the digital media and devices around us and find ourselves left in the dust of other countries where greater numbers of students are learning to program. The other nine rules are thought-provoking as well- from "Do not always be on" to "Do not sell your friends."
I bought this book partially because I was interested in the way it was published. The author deliberately chose to publish with a small, independent publisher and to sell the book through the publisher's website only. He promoted it through Boing Boing and other sites. The price was a bit steep for such a small book, but I was happy to know that more of the money was going to the creator and an independent business, rather than a big corporation.
The book describes ten rules for owning, rather being owned, by the new digital world that we find ourselves in. The final rule is to learn how to program, lest we become owned by the digital media and devices around us and find ourselves left in the dust of other countries where greater numbers of students are learning to program. The other nine rules are thought-provoking as well- from "Do not always be on" to "Do not sell your friends."
November 20, 2014
I have long been thinking about the shifts that digital medias have been creating in life and society, in many contexts. One of the major questions i always had was if the use of ifferent tools or media for communication and other tasks really makes a difference in the human aspect of it, or is it just the same book in a different cover. I have mostly been on the side that it's all the same same, only peope get disorientated from seeing the same things in a different setting.
Rushkoff introduces the idea of a bias, using the metaphor of a gun. while it's true that guns don't kill, people do. a gun is a tool biased towards killing more than say a kitchen knife. This thought lends nuance to the question, and provides a better framewok for this converstion than the black and white framing of the question.
Rushkoff introduces the idea of a bias, using the metaphor of a gun. while it's true that guns don't kill, people do. a gun is a tool biased towards killing more than say a kitchen knife. This thought lends nuance to the question, and provides a better framewok for this converstion than the black and white framing of the question.
December 20, 2010
A thought-provoking starting with a much more conservative approach as a resolution. I'd love to see more futuristic and modern approaches to resolve the challenges which are segmented in this book instead of trying to eliminate these problems which in my eyes aren't really problems but challenges and options which we can adapt and use for our own development and purposes. Although this book can be useful for anyone who is new to these subjects and might be even inspirational.
February 24, 2011
I have no idea why I forced myself to finish this substance-less punditry. It gets two stars because it has a list of good beginning programming resources in the back, and the book might be a good text for high school media studies or technology class.
April 16, 2014
To the point about technology having a "mind" or bias of its own. Yet media has always had these biases: compressing space, extending time, de-personalizing, etc. Now faster and more extensively. I'm still not sure what programming of code has to do with "programming" of a social nature.
Currently reading
October 17, 2010I've been feeling this meme coming for a while. leave it to Rushkoff to jump on it first.
March 6, 2011
Really disappointed in this one, as I love and believe in the titular idea. The contents are a series of pronouncements which, IMHO, don't really stand up to scrutiny.
September 8, 2014
Lecture pour la maîtrise, le livre reste accessible (côté langage) en plus d'être très intéressant et pertinent!
January 3, 2016
Program or Be Programmed (2010) é um livro escrito por Douglas Rushkoff e é um livro que analisa e aponta mandamentos, mais concretamente dez, sobre o que significa viver num mundo digital como aquele que temos atualmente. E consequentemente, tenta chamar à nossa consciência conselhos de como podemos nos ajustar melhor a ele.
O autor é escritor, professor e documentalista que foca as maneiras como as pessoas, culturas e instituições criam, partilham e influenciam todos os seus valores, sempre sobre o tema da tecnologia. O livro é um seguimento do documentátio Digital Nation (2011) que também aqui sobre ele tinha escrito.
Na introdução do livro o autor explica-nos que as pessoas começaram por ver na Internet uma nova oportunidade para a participação amadora em coordenados setores dos media e a sociedade.
Esta, a sociedade que olhou para a Internet como um caminho para conexões articuladas e novos métodos de criar conhecimento. Porém, para o autor, a sociedade está a encontrar-se desconetada, a negar pensamento profundo e drenado de valores profundos.
Para o autor isto poderia não acontecer se simplesmente nós tivéssemos entendido a direção oblíqua das tecnologias que estamos utilizando e tornasse-nos participantes conscientemente ativos nas maneiras em que elas são implantadas. É uma questão de pausar-nos o botão e nos perguntar o que a tecnologia significa para o futuro da nossa vida, do nosso trabalho e mesmo da nossa espécie?
Porque se pensarmos na tecnologia como um organismo cibernético , para já é mais um organismo mafioso do que um novo cérebro humano coletivo, pelo menos é o que autor argumenta.
Por outras palavras, o que o autor nos quer dizer é que na nossa longa evolução, cada nova revolução que os media conseguiram criar, apresentaram novas perspetivas através das quais nos relacionamos com o mundo.
Por exemplo, a linguagem levou ao conhecimento partilhado, a uma experiência cumulativa e a possibilidade do progresso. O alfabeto levou-nos à responsabilidade, ao pensamento abstrato, monoteísmo e leis contratuais. A Imprensa escrita e as leituras privadas levou-nos a uma nova experiência de individualidade, a uma pessoal relação com deus, à Reforma Protestante, direitos humanos e ao Iluminismo.
Isto é, com o advento de um novo meio o status quo não só se torna mais escrutinado, como é revisado e reescrito por aqueles que ganharam um novo acesso às ferramentas das suas criações.
A invenção da Imprensa na Renascença levou não a uma sociedade de escritores mas uma de leitores. A rádio e a televisão foram realmente apenas extensões da Imprensa escrita: cara e um dos muitos meios que promoveram a distribuição em massa de estórias e ideias de uma elite minoritária para o centro. Computadores e redes, finalmente, ofereceram-nos a habilidade para escrever. Pois nós escrevemos com eles nos nossos websites, blogs e redes sociais. Mas a capacidade subjacente da era do computador é realmente programar, o que a maior parte de nós não sabe fazer.
Como resultado, a maioria da sociedade mantém-se num salto dimensional de falta de consciência e capacidades por detrás dos poucos que gerem e monopolizam o acesso real ao poder de qualquer era de comunicação.
Nesse sentido, o autor diz que em vez de estarmos a otimizar as nossas máquinas para a humanidade ou mesmo para benefício de qualquer grupo particular, nós estamos a otimizar os humanos para a maquinaria. Porque nós não estamos apenas a estender uma agência humana através de uma nova linguística ou sistema de comunicação. Nós estamos a replicar a mesma função da cognição através de externos, extra humanos mecanismos.
Em suma, o autor refere que a Revolução Industrial desafiou-nos a repensar os limites do corpo humano. Perguntas do tipo: onde o meu corpo termina e a ferramenta começa? Pelo contrário, a Era Digital desafia-nos a repensar os limites da mente humana.
Por aquela razão, podemos perguntar quais são as fronteiras da nossa cognição? Assim, o autor sugere no livro dez mandamentos que nos podem ajudar a construir um caminho melhor sobre o reino digital. Cada comando é baseado nas tendências da direção oblíqua dos meios digitais e sugere como conseguir um balanço entre esse viés com as necessidades reais das pessoas que vivem e trabalham ao mesmo tempo no mundo físico e virtual.
Dito tudo aquilo, segue abaixo excertos do livro em que o autor sucinta as suas ideias no início de cada um dos dez mandamentos e que, na minha opinião, sucinta muito bem as ideias que o autor tenta expor e é, efetivamente, o que interessa assimilar do livro.
Time: Do Not Be Always On
The human nervous system exists in the present tense. We live in a continuous “now,” and time is always passing for us. Digital technologies do not exist in time, at all. By marrying our time-based bodies and minds to technologies that are biased against time altogether, we end up divorcing ourselves from the rhythms, cycles, and continuity on which we depend for coherence.
Place: Live in Person
Digital networks are descentralized technologies. They work from far away exchanging intimacy for distance. This makes them terrifically suitable for long-distance communication and activities, but rather awfull for engaging with what - or who - is right front us. By using a dislocating technology for local connection, we lose our sense of place, as well as our home field advantage.
Choice: You Always Choose None of the Above
In the digital realm, everything is made into a choice. The medium is biased toward the discrete. This often leaves out things we have not chosen to notice or record, and forces choices when none need to be made.
Complexity: You Are Never Completely Right
Although they allowed us to work with certain kinds of complexity in the first place, our digital tools often oversimplify nuanced problems. Biased against contradiction and compromise, our digital media tend to polarize us into opposing camps, incapable of recognizing shared values or dealing with paradox. On the net, we cast out for answers through simple search terms rather than diving into an inquiry and following extended lines of logic. We lose sight of the fact that our digital tools are modeling reality, not substituting for it, and mistake its oversimplified contours for the way things should be. By acknowledging the bias of the digital toward a reduction of complexity, we regain the ability to treat its simulations as models occurring in a vacuum rather than accurate depictions of our world.
Scale: One Size Does Not Fit All
On the net, everything scales—or at least it’s supposed to. Digital technologies are biased toward abstraction, bringing everything up and out to the same universal level. People, ideas, and businesses that don’t function on that level are disadvantaged, while those committ ed to increasing levels of abstraction tend to dominate. By remembering that one size does not fi t all, we can preserve local and particular activities in the face of demands to scale up.
Identity: Be Yourself
Our digital experiences are out-of-body. This biases us toward depersonalized behavior in an environment where one’s identity can be a liability. But the more anonymously we engage with others, the less we experience the human repercussions of what we say and do. By resisting the temptation to engage from the apparent safety of anonymity, we remain accountable and present—and much more likely to bring our humanity with us into the digital realm.
Social: Do Not Sell Your Friends
In spite of its many dehumanizing tendencies, digital media is still biased toward the social. In the ongoing coevolution between people and technologies, tools that connect us thrive—and tools that don’t connect us soon learn to. We must remember that the bias of digital media is toward contact with other people, not with their content or, worse, their cash. If we don’t, we risk robbing ourselves of the main gift digital technology has to off er us in return for our having created it.
Fact: Tell the Truth
The network is like a truth serum: Put something false online and it will eventually be revealed as a lie. Digital technology is biased against fiction and toward facts, against story and toward reality. This means the only option for those communicating in these spaces is to tell the truth.
Openness: Share, Don’t Steal
Digital networks were built for the purpose of sharing computing resources by people who were themselves sharing resources, technologies, and credit in order to create it. This is why digital technology is biased in favor of openness and sharing. Because we are not used to operating in a realm with these biases, however, we often exploit the openness of others or end up exploited ourselves. By learning the difference between sharing and stealing, we can promote openness without succumbing to selfi shness.
Purpose: Program or Be Programmed
Digital technology is programmed. This makes it biased toward those with the capacity to write the code. In a digital age, we must learn how to make the soft ware, or risk becoming the soft ware. It is not too diffi cult or too late to learn the code behind the things we use—or at least to understand that there is code behind their interfaces. Otherwise, we are at the mercy of those who do the programming, the people paying them, or even the technology itself.
O autor é escritor, professor e documentalista que foca as maneiras como as pessoas, culturas e instituições criam, partilham e influenciam todos os seus valores, sempre sobre o tema da tecnologia. O livro é um seguimento do documentátio Digital Nation (2011) que também aqui sobre ele tinha escrito.
Na introdução do livro o autor explica-nos que as pessoas começaram por ver na Internet uma nova oportunidade para a participação amadora em coordenados setores dos media e a sociedade.
Esta, a sociedade que olhou para a Internet como um caminho para conexões articuladas e novos métodos de criar conhecimento. Porém, para o autor, a sociedade está a encontrar-se desconetada, a negar pensamento profundo e drenado de valores profundos.
Para o autor isto poderia não acontecer se simplesmente nós tivéssemos entendido a direção oblíqua das tecnologias que estamos utilizando e tornasse-nos participantes conscientemente ativos nas maneiras em que elas são implantadas. É uma questão de pausar-nos o botão e nos perguntar o que a tecnologia significa para o futuro da nossa vida, do nosso trabalho e mesmo da nossa espécie?
Porque se pensarmos na tecnologia como um organismo cibernético , para já é mais um organismo mafioso do que um novo cérebro humano coletivo, pelo menos é o que autor argumenta.
Por outras palavras, o que o autor nos quer dizer é que na nossa longa evolução, cada nova revolução que os media conseguiram criar, apresentaram novas perspetivas através das quais nos relacionamos com o mundo.
Por exemplo, a linguagem levou ao conhecimento partilhado, a uma experiência cumulativa e a possibilidade do progresso. O alfabeto levou-nos à responsabilidade, ao pensamento abstrato, monoteísmo e leis contratuais. A Imprensa escrita e as leituras privadas levou-nos a uma nova experiência de individualidade, a uma pessoal relação com deus, à Reforma Protestante, direitos humanos e ao Iluminismo.
Isto é, com o advento de um novo meio o status quo não só se torna mais escrutinado, como é revisado e reescrito por aqueles que ganharam um novo acesso às ferramentas das suas criações.
A invenção da Imprensa na Renascença levou não a uma sociedade de escritores mas uma de leitores. A rádio e a televisão foram realmente apenas extensões da Imprensa escrita: cara e um dos muitos meios que promoveram a distribuição em massa de estórias e ideias de uma elite minoritária para o centro. Computadores e redes, finalmente, ofereceram-nos a habilidade para escrever. Pois nós escrevemos com eles nos nossos websites, blogs e redes sociais. Mas a capacidade subjacente da era do computador é realmente programar, o que a maior parte de nós não sabe fazer.
Como resultado, a maioria da sociedade mantém-se num salto dimensional de falta de consciência e capacidades por detrás dos poucos que gerem e monopolizam o acesso real ao poder de qualquer era de comunicação.
Nesse sentido, o autor diz que em vez de estarmos a otimizar as nossas máquinas para a humanidade ou mesmo para benefício de qualquer grupo particular, nós estamos a otimizar os humanos para a maquinaria. Porque nós não estamos apenas a estender uma agência humana através de uma nova linguística ou sistema de comunicação. Nós estamos a replicar a mesma função da cognição através de externos, extra humanos mecanismos.
Em suma, o autor refere que a Revolução Industrial desafiou-nos a repensar os limites do corpo humano. Perguntas do tipo: onde o meu corpo termina e a ferramenta começa? Pelo contrário, a Era Digital desafia-nos a repensar os limites da mente humana.
Por aquela razão, podemos perguntar quais são as fronteiras da nossa cognição? Assim, o autor sugere no livro dez mandamentos que nos podem ajudar a construir um caminho melhor sobre o reino digital. Cada comando é baseado nas tendências da direção oblíqua dos meios digitais e sugere como conseguir um balanço entre esse viés com as necessidades reais das pessoas que vivem e trabalham ao mesmo tempo no mundo físico e virtual.
Dito tudo aquilo, segue abaixo excertos do livro em que o autor sucinta as suas ideias no início de cada um dos dez mandamentos e que, na minha opinião, sucinta muito bem as ideias que o autor tenta expor e é, efetivamente, o que interessa assimilar do livro.
Time: Do Not Be Always On
The human nervous system exists in the present tense. We live in a continuous “now,” and time is always passing for us. Digital technologies do not exist in time, at all. By marrying our time-based bodies and minds to technologies that are biased against time altogether, we end up divorcing ourselves from the rhythms, cycles, and continuity on which we depend for coherence.
Place: Live in Person
Digital networks are descentralized technologies. They work from far away exchanging intimacy for distance. This makes them terrifically suitable for long-distance communication and activities, but rather awfull for engaging with what - or who - is right front us. By using a dislocating technology for local connection, we lose our sense of place, as well as our home field advantage.
Choice: You Always Choose None of the Above
In the digital realm, everything is made into a choice. The medium is biased toward the discrete. This often leaves out things we have not chosen to notice or record, and forces choices when none need to be made.
Complexity: You Are Never Completely Right
Although they allowed us to work with certain kinds of complexity in the first place, our digital tools often oversimplify nuanced problems. Biased against contradiction and compromise, our digital media tend to polarize us into opposing camps, incapable of recognizing shared values or dealing with paradox. On the net, we cast out for answers through simple search terms rather than diving into an inquiry and following extended lines of logic. We lose sight of the fact that our digital tools are modeling reality, not substituting for it, and mistake its oversimplified contours for the way things should be. By acknowledging the bias of the digital toward a reduction of complexity, we regain the ability to treat its simulations as models occurring in a vacuum rather than accurate depictions of our world.
Scale: One Size Does Not Fit All
On the net, everything scales—or at least it’s supposed to. Digital technologies are biased toward abstraction, bringing everything up and out to the same universal level. People, ideas, and businesses that don’t function on that level are disadvantaged, while those committ ed to increasing levels of abstraction tend to dominate. By remembering that one size does not fi t all, we can preserve local and particular activities in the face of demands to scale up.
Identity: Be Yourself
Our digital experiences are out-of-body. This biases us toward depersonalized behavior in an environment where one’s identity can be a liability. But the more anonymously we engage with others, the less we experience the human repercussions of what we say and do. By resisting the temptation to engage from the apparent safety of anonymity, we remain accountable and present—and much more likely to bring our humanity with us into the digital realm.
Social: Do Not Sell Your Friends
In spite of its many dehumanizing tendencies, digital media is still biased toward the social. In the ongoing coevolution between people and technologies, tools that connect us thrive—and tools that don’t connect us soon learn to. We must remember that the bias of digital media is toward contact with other people, not with their content or, worse, their cash. If we don’t, we risk robbing ourselves of the main gift digital technology has to off er us in return for our having created it.
Fact: Tell the Truth
The network is like a truth serum: Put something false online and it will eventually be revealed as a lie. Digital technology is biased against fiction and toward facts, against story and toward reality. This means the only option for those communicating in these spaces is to tell the truth.
Openness: Share, Don’t Steal
Digital networks were built for the purpose of sharing computing resources by people who were themselves sharing resources, technologies, and credit in order to create it. This is why digital technology is biased in favor of openness and sharing. Because we are not used to operating in a realm with these biases, however, we often exploit the openness of others or end up exploited ourselves. By learning the difference between sharing and stealing, we can promote openness without succumbing to selfi shness.
Purpose: Program or Be Programmed
Digital technology is programmed. This makes it biased toward those with the capacity to write the code. In a digital age, we must learn how to make the soft ware, or risk becoming the soft ware. It is not too diffi cult or too late to learn the code behind the things we use—or at least to understand that there is code behind their interfaces. Otherwise, we are at the mercy of those who do the programming, the people paying them, or even the technology itself.
June 24, 2017
"Program or be Programmed", despite its title, is not a technical book. The programming is not really (or not wholly) referring to actual programming languages, it's not a programming manual. It's a brief practical handbook which purpose is to make one realize that digital technologies have certain biases, and when used in accordance to their biases these techs improve our quality of life; when used against these inherent biases they are much less effective, even harmful.
The book presents 10 such biases, in the form of "10 Commands for the Digital Age". Some are really great, insightful ideas. Other seem a bit artificially stretched, perhaps to reach that nice round number 10. However, even the commandments/biases that aren't that interesting offer valuable apprehensions.
The best element of Rushkoff's writing is his default optimism about technology and the digital age. This is not a preachy book. It's not a defeatist one, either. The author does not make accusations and doesn't deride anyone.
In a nutshell, Rushkoff says, "The digital age is here and it isn't going away. It's simply another stage in our development which offers some wonderful possibilities. It also has some pitfalls. The better grasp you have about your tech, the better you can use it - and not let it use you instead."
"Program or be Programmed" is interesting and very clearly laid out. Certainly a recommended read for those who like their technology, and who think about it, too, in addition to simply using it. It's a neat little instruction manual on becoming a better digital citizen.
The book presents 10 such biases, in the form of "10 Commands for the Digital Age". Some are really great, insightful ideas. Other seem a bit artificially stretched, perhaps to reach that nice round number 10. However, even the commandments/biases that aren't that interesting offer valuable apprehensions.
The best element of Rushkoff's writing is his default optimism about technology and the digital age. This is not a preachy book. It's not a defeatist one, either. The author does not make accusations and doesn't deride anyone.
In a nutshell, Rushkoff says, "The digital age is here and it isn't going away. It's simply another stage in our development which offers some wonderful possibilities. It also has some pitfalls. The better grasp you have about your tech, the better you can use it - and not let it use you instead."
"Program or be Programmed" is interesting and very clearly laid out. Certainly a recommended read for those who like their technology, and who think about it, too, in addition to simply using it. It's a neat little instruction manual on becoming a better digital citizen.
March 11, 2022
I thought this book would be about programming in the television sense of content - "don't just read, write; don't just watch, do," that sort of thing. And it sort of is - but he really means program in the "write computer programs" sense.
Despite the high-tech imperative, Rushkoff advocates more for limiting abuse of technology in ways that decrease quality of life. He is like Bit Literacy's author in emphasizing that people should be conscious of and control how they use technology. He can almost seem anti-technology. His personal example is that he does not use any sort of projected display when he does talks, because he wants to focus on the quality of his real in-person presence. You can watch PowerPoint slides without a person there, after all.
Rushkoff's central programming argument is not ever really all that compelling, but it is kind of interesting. He says that as technology has advanced, the masses have been one level behind the state of the art. So even when writing was invented, most people only listened to things read to them by priests or whatever. When printing was invented, people started to read but not write (or, publish). Now with computers and the Internet, everybody's writing, but still only specialists are programming. Rushkoff thinks programming is important and thinks ordinary people should be doing it too, or at least learning enough to understand it. There's a little bit of a "programming will create the future hive-mind of Homo sapiens neo" thing going on too, but just a touch.
Despite the high-tech imperative, Rushkoff advocates more for limiting abuse of technology in ways that decrease quality of life. He is like Bit Literacy's author in emphasizing that people should be conscious of and control how they use technology. He can almost seem anti-technology. His personal example is that he does not use any sort of projected display when he does talks, because he wants to focus on the quality of his real in-person presence. You can watch PowerPoint slides without a person there, after all.
Rushkoff's central programming argument is not ever really all that compelling, but it is kind of interesting. He says that as technology has advanced, the masses have been one level behind the state of the art. So even when writing was invented, most people only listened to things read to them by priests or whatever. When printing was invented, people started to read but not write (or, publish). Now with computers and the Internet, everybody's writing, but still only specialists are programming. Rushkoff thinks programming is important and thinks ordinary people should be doing it too, or at least learning enough to understand it. There's a little bit of a "programming will create the future hive-mind of Homo sapiens neo" thing going on too, but just a touch.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 203 reviews