Coercion : Why We Listen to What "They" Say by Douglas Rushkoff  (48)
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Everything Bad is Good for You by Steven Johnson  (86)
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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
Three years after the original publication of Playing the Future: What We Can Learn from Digital Kids in 1996, this breathlessly polemical defense of the techno-savvy youth culture of the '90s already reads like a document from another era. Back then, the Internet was still a strange new force, instinctively embraced by kids who'd grown up playing video games, instinctively distrusted by the grownups who ran the mainstream media. Standing up for the emergent digital culture--loosely associated with suspicious activities like raves, role-playing games, and piercing--took nerve and optimism.
Three years after the original publication of Playing the Future: What We Can Learn from Digital Kids in 1996, this breathlessly polemical defense of the techno-savvy youth culture of the '90s already reads like a document from another era. Back then, the Internet was still a strange new force, instinctively embraced by kids who'd grown up playing video games, instinctively distrusted by the grownups who ran the mainstream media. Standing up for the emergent digital culture--loosely associated with suspicious activities like raves, role-playing games, and piercing--took nerve and optimism.
And Douglas Rushkoff here supplies both in abundance. His argument: contemporary "screenagers," as he calls them, aren't being warped by new technologies, they're adapting to them. Their relationship to play, work, spirituality, and politics all reflect the contours of a new world shaped by the liberating logic of digital networks and chaos theory. It's a better world, Rushkoff assures us, and if the grownups know what's good for them, they will stop looking askance at the ways of digital youth and start trying to learn from them instead.
Ultimately, Rushkoff seems a lot more interested in making his argument than in making it stick. He flies from one loose logical connection to another--the secret link between fractal math and snowboarding, the parallel between Web browser interfaces and Federal Reserve notes--and he alternates between near-brilliance and utter implausibility as he goes.
But even nowadays, when the heated rhetoric that met the first wave of digital culture is generally giving way to more nuanced analysis, there's something contagious about Rushkoff's passionate faith that the kids are all right. He may not convince you, but after this intellectual joy ride is over, that may not matter. Like any good child of the '90s, you'll want to believe. --Julian Dibbell
Book Description
A provocative look at how kids' culture can give us the tools for survival in the increasingly complex 21st century.
Do "The Simpsons" represent a leap forward in media consciousness? Do Sega video games and channel-surfing offer new strategies for coping in a world fraught with unpredictability? Can raves, snowboarding, or online chatting teach us something about adapting to cultural change? Douglas Rushkoff, "one of the great thinkers and writers of our time" (Timothy Leary) says yes, yes, and yes.
* Revised and updated with a new introduction by the author
* Hailed as "the brilliant heir to Marshall McLuhan" (New Perspectives Quarterly).
* Rushkoff has been a consultant to Fortune 500 companies on the new media: "When Douglas Rushkoff speaks, TV executives and programmers listen--and pay him well to explain how to reach young viewers."--New York Times
* Rushkoff's articles on pop culture, media, and technology have appeared in Esquire, Details, GQ, Paper, Wired, and Time
* Rushkoff has written a regular weekly column for The New York Times Syndicate, and currently writes regularly for The London Guardian and The Australian
* Rushkoff has appeared on CNN, "Larry King Live," "Frontline," "Bill Moyers," BBC News, CNBC, MSNBC, FOX, CBC, NPR, "NBC Nightly News," WOR, KQED, and dozens of other television and radio programs
"An exuberant progressive, [Rushkoff] contends that kids today, who were weaned on Macintosh and MTV, have developed adaptive strategies to live in a mediasphere in which CNN seems less real than Pulp Fiction....Rushkoff gently nudges us to loosen up and celebrate the pace of change in which our kids have learned to thrive...it's hard to argue with his contention that a hearty dose of the Net would give us a fighting chance of learning about the future that our children already know." --San Francisco Chronicle
"Makes dazzling links between chaos theory and Rodney King, snowboarding and William Gibson, rave culture and Star Wars...the literary equivalent of U2's Zoo TV."--Vox
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