HCPP20 - DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF - From Figure to Ground: How Humans Became Technology’s Tools

Digital technology is being developed with little or no awareness of the underlying operating system: corporate capitalism. New technologies are developed purely for their ability to extract value from people and places, instead of providing human beings with the capabilities they need to create and exchange value for themselves. As a result, we now live in a media environment where technologies use people more than people use technology.

One of the greatest promises of new media technologies was to unlock closed-ended narratives and offer people the opportunity to participate, actively, in the creation of a new human story. In this talk, media theorist and author Douglas Rushkoff will use the lens of critical economic analysis to explain how this potential renaissance for human connection and flourishing was leveraged instead to amplify the most predictable, extractive, and dehumanizing aspects of the market. He will also offer a path for digital, transmedia, and other post-linear creators to retrieve the human values driving our work by restoring the cultural alchemy at its core.

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DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF

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.

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Видео HCPP20 - DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF - From Figure to Ground: How Humans Became Technology’s Tools канала Paralelní Polis