Douglas Rushkoff (born 18 February 1961) is an American media theorist, writer, columnist, lecturer, graphic novelist and documentarian. He is best known for his association with the early cyberpunk culture, and his advocacy of open source solutions to social problems.
Rushkoff is most frequently regarded as a media theorist, and known for coining terms and concepts including viral media (or media virus), digital native, and social currency.
He has written ten books on media, technology, and culture. He wrote the first syndicated column on cyberculture for The New York Times Syndicate, as well as regular columns for The Guardian of London, Arthur, Discover, and the online magazines Daily Beast and TheFeature.com.
Rushkoff currently teaches in the Media Studies department at The New School University in Manhattan. He has previously lectured at New York University’s ITP and taught a class called Narrative Lab. He also has taught online for the MaybeLogic Academy.
Rushkoff graduated from Princeton University in 1983. He moved to Los Angeles and completed a Master of Fine Arts in Directing from the California Institute of the Arts. Later he took up a post-graduate fellowship from the American Film Institute. He is currently a PhD candidate at Utrecht University's New Media Program, writing a dissertation on new media literacies.
Rushkoff emerged in the early 1990s as active member of the cyberpunk movement, developing friendships and collaborations with people including Timothy Leary, RU Sirius, Paul Krassner, Robert Anton Wilson, Ralph Abraham, Terence McKenna, Genesis P-Orridge, Richard Metzger, Grant Morrison, Mark Pesce, Erik Davis, and other writers, artists and philosophers interested in the intersection of technology, society and culture.
As his books became more accepted (his first book on cyberculture, Cyberia, was canceled by its original publisher, Bantam, in 1992 because editors feared the Internet would be "over" by the original scheduled publication date in Fall 1993 - it was eventually published in 1994 ), and his concepts of the "media virus" and "social contagion" became mainstream ideas, Rushkoff was invited to deliver commentaries on National Public Radio's All Things Considered, and to make documentaries for the PBS series Frontline.
Rushkoff was awarded the Marshall McLuhan Award by the Media Ecology Association for his book Coercion, and then invited to become a member and eventually sit on the board of directors of that organization. This allied him both in spirit and affiliation with the Media Ecologists, a continuation of what is known as the Toronto School of media theorists including Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong, and Neil Postman.
As a result, Rushkoff was invited to participate in government and industry as a consultant - which usually consisted of a single lecture or appearance, and led to much consternation among his readership. His associations ranged from the United Nations Commission on World Culture and the US Department of State to Sony Corporation and TCI.
Simultaneously, Rushkoff continued to develop his relationship with counterculture figures, collaborating with Genesis P-Orridge as a keyboardist for Psychic TV, and credited with composing music for the album Hell is Invisible Heaven is Her/e. Rushkoff taught classes in media theory and in media subversion for the New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program, participated in activist pranks with the Yes Men and eToy, contributed to numerous books and documentaries on psychedelics, and spoke or appeared at many events sponsored by counterculture publisher Disinformation.
Influences
References to media ecologist and Toronto School of Communication founder Marshall McLuhan appear throughout Rushkoff’s work as a focus on media over content, the effects of media on popular culture and the level at which people participate when consuming media. Rushkoff’s colleagues in The Toronto School include Neil Postman and Lance Strate.Rushkoff worked with both Robert Anton Wilson and Timothy Leary on developing philosophical systems to explain consciousness, its interaction with technology, and social evolution of the human species, and references both consistently in his work.Leary, along with John Barlow and Terrence McKenna characterized the mid-90s as techno-utopian, and saw the rapid acceleration of culture, emerging media and the unchecked advancement of technology as completely positive.Rushkoff's own unbridled enthusiasm for cyberculture was tempered by the dotcom boom, when the non-profit character of the Internet was rapidly overtaken by corporations and venture capital. Rushkoff often cites two events in particular - the day Netscape became a public company in 1995, and the day AOL bought TimeWarner in 2000 - as pivotal moments in his understanding of the forces at work in the evolution of new media.He spent several years exploring Judaism as a primer for media literacy, going so far as to publish a book inviting Jews to restore the religion to its "open source" roots. He founded a movement for progressive Judaism called Reboot, but subsequently left when he felt its funders had become more concerned with marketing and publicity of Judaism than its actual improvement and evolution.Disillusioned by the failure of the open source model to challenge entrenched and institutional hierarchies from religion to finance, he became a colleague of Mark Crispin Miller and Naomi Klein, appearing with them at Smith College as well as in numerous documentaries decrying the corporatization of public space and consciousness.He has dedicated himself most recently to the issues of media literacy, participatory government, and the development of local and complementary currencies. He wrote a book and film called Life Inc., which traces the development of corporatism and centralized currency from the Renaissance to today, and hosts a radio show called MediaSquat on WFMU, concerned with reclaiming commerce and culture from corporate domination.
Awards and appointments
Douglas Rushkoff serves on the Board of Directors of the Media Ecology Association, The Center for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics, and is a founding member of Technorealism, as well as of the Advisory Board of The National Association for Media Literacy Education, MeetUp.com and HyperWords
He is the winner of the first Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity, in 2004.
Douglas Rushkoff’s philosophy developed from a techno-utopian view of new media to a more nuanced critique of cyberculture discourse and the impact of media on society. Viewing everything except for intention as media, he frequently explores the themes of how to make media interactive, how to help people (especially children) effectively analyze and question the media they consume, as well as how to cultivate intention and agency. He has theorized on such media as religion, culture, politics and money.
Technology and cyberculture
Up to the late-90s, Douglas Rushkoff’s philosophy towards technology could be characterized as media-deterministic. Cyberculture and new media were supposed to promote democracy and allow people to transcend the ordinary.
In Cyberia, Rushkoff states the essence of mid-90s culture as being the fusion of rave psychedelia, chaos theory and early computer networks. The promise of the resulting “counter culture” was that media would change form being passive to active, that we would embrace the social over content, and that empowers the masses to create and react.
This idea also comes up in the concept of the media virus, which Rushkoff details in the 1994 publication of Media Virus: Hidden Agendas in Popular Culture. This significant work adopts organic metaphors to show that media, like viruses, are mobile, easily duplicated and presented as non-threatening. Technologies can make our interaction with media an empowering experience if we learn to decode the capabilities offered to us by our media. Unfortunately, people often stay one step behind our media capabilities. Ideally, emerging media and technologies have the potential to enlighten, to aid grassroots movements, to offer an alternative to the traditional “top-down” media, to connect diverse groups and to promote the sharing of information.
Rushkoff does not limit his writings to the effect of technology on adults, and in Playing the Future turns his attention to the generation of people growing up who understand the language of media like natives, guarded against coercion. These “screenagers”, a term originated by Rushkoff, have the chance to mediate the changing landscape more effectively than digital immigrants.
With Coercion (1999), Rushkoff realistically examines the potential benefits and dangers inherent in cyberculture and analyzes market strategies that work to make people act on instinct (and buy!) rather than reflect rationally. The book wants readers to learn to “read” the media they consume and interpret what is really being communicated.
Religion
Nothing Sacred explores the medium of religion and intellectually deconstructs the Bible and the ways that religion fails to provide true connectivity and transformative experiences. The book mainly wants readers to reflect on why things are a certain way and not attribute them to some predestined reality.
Currency
Most recently, Douglas Rushkoff has turned his critical lens to the medium of currency. One of the most important concepts that he coins and develops is the notion of social currency, or the degree to which certain content and media can facilitate and/or promote relationships and interactions between members of a community. Rushkoff mentions jokes, scandals, blogs, ambience, i.e. anything that would engender "water cooler" talk, as social currency.
In his latest book, Life, Inc., Rushkoff takes a look at physical currency and the history of corporatism. Beginning with an overview of how money has been gradually centralized throughout time, and pondering the reasons and consequences of such a fact, he goes on to demonstrate how our society has become defined by and controlled by corporate culture.
2010. Program or be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age Ebook ISBN 9781935928164
2009. Life, Inc.: How the World Became A Corporation and How To Take It Back ISBN 9781400066896
2005. Get Back in the Box: Innovation from the Inside Out ISBN 9780060758691
2003. Open Source Democracy A Demos Essay
2003. Nothing Sacred: The Truth About Judaism ISBN 9781400051397
1999. Coercion: Why We Listen to What "They" Say ISBN 9781573228299
1996. Playing the Future: What We Can Learn From Digital Kids ISBN 9781573227643 (Published in the UK in 1997 as "Children of Chaos: Surviving the End of the World as We Know it" ISBN 0006548792)
1995. Media Virus: Hidden Agendas in Popular Culture ISBN 9780345397744
1994. Life in the Trenches of Cyberspace ISBN 9781903083246
Fiction works
2002. Exit Strategy (aka Bull) ISBN 9781887128902
1997. Ecstasy Club ISBN 9781573227025
Graphic Novels
2005-2008. Testament ISBN 9781401210632
2004. Club Zero-G ISBN 9780972952934
Documentaries
2009 - 2010 Digital Nation, Life on the Virtual Frontier. Web site and documentary
2009 Life Inc. The Movie
2004 The Persuaders. This documentary examines the psychological techniques behind popular marketing and advertising trends, determines how these methods influence how we view ourselves and desires, and postulates on the future implications of these persuasive approaches at work.
2001 Merchants of Cool, a groundbreaking, award-winning Frontline documentary which explores the people, marketing techniques and ideologies behind popular culture for teenagers. This video attempts to answer whether or not teen popular culture is reflective of its population or manufactured by big business and related groups.
Radio
The Media Squat (creator and host): freeform, bottom-up, open source WFMU radio which examines similarly open source, bottom-up solutions to some of the problems engendered by our relentlessly top-down society.
