This episode is now available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher and Amazon Music.
In the digital age, when we are bombarded by media and competing narratives from all directions, awareness is key. Are we passive or active in what stories we consume? How well-versed are we in the digital lexicon, and what does this mean for our position in society? How does today’s media foster relationships, and between whom?
In this GLF Live, Douglas Rushkoff, a leading thinker and explorer of the media ecosystem, gave insights on what our media consumption means, and how this can shape our own narratives, even without our knowing. This formed part of the Storytelling Track of the GLF Bonn 2020 digital conference.
Listen back to the conversation as a podcast, or re-watch it on YouTube:
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Technology is a useful servant but a dangerous master.
Christian Lous Lange
The way we communicate with others and with ourselves ultimately determines the quality of our lives.
Anthony Robbins
Named one of the “world’s ten most influential intellectuals” by MIT, Douglas Rushkoff is an author and documentarian who studies human autonomy in a digital age. His twenty books include the just-published Team Human, based on his podcast, as well as the bestsellers Present Shock, Throwing Rocks and the Google Bus, Program or Be Programmed, Life Inc, and Media Virus. He also made the PBS Frontline documentaries Generation Like, The Persuaders, and Merchants of Cool. His book Coercion won the Marshall McLuhan Award, and the Media Ecology Association honored him with the first Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity.Rushkoff’s work explores how different technological environments change our relationship to narrative, money, power, and one another. He coined such concepts as “viral media,” “screenagers,” and “social currency,” and has been a leading voice for applying digital media toward social and economic justice. He a research fellow of the Institute for the Future, and founder of the Laboratory for Digital Humanism at CUNY/Queens, where he is a Professor of Media Theory and Digital Economics. He is a columnist for Medium, and his novels and comics, Ecstasy Club, A.D.D, and Aleister & Adolf, are all being developed for the screen.
Relevant Materials
- ‘Team Human’ Stresses That The Future Lies In Connection And Cooperation, an interview with Rushkoff on NPR on his latest book
- Turtles from the shells, an essay by Rushkoff
- Code literacy: A 21st century requirement, an essay by Rushkoff