Present Shock -- When Everything Happend Now: Douglas Rushkoff at TEDxNYED

so the original rules for Ted as I learned them from Richard Saul Wurman back in gosh 1993 or 94 was that you were not allowed to prepare you weren't allowed to sell from the stage right you basically had 11 minutes you got up and you shared and it's interesting where Ted's gone since then right I mean now it's so much of it is I have this object you know and once we get our funding it will save the world and children in India will eat and here's my PowerPoint to show you how that's gonna happen and you know and this this sort of practiced this practice thing that's that's really biased towards distribution right the idea is I'm going to do this talk here and then hopefully my video will be the one that spreads but what what Richard understood was that at the dawn of the digital age that the live connection between people in a space could become a very valuable special unique thing right and that bringing people into real time in a real space together could finally be appreciated for what it is because we have this internet we have this digital technology to do this other thing right when the net first came around and for me anyway in the late 80s early 90s the thing that most of us thought was that this was going to be a way that I could reclaim my time from the man right we were part of that that slacker era right where we thought now we can stay at home work on our underwear in our own time and sell things directly to other people if we want to and then not have to be in that punch the clock Society anymore not have to work all the time and I'd have to sell our time and be sort of on yet what have we done with these technologies right as we've taken them and turned them into always on technology strap them onto our onto our bodies and and keep ourselves responding to them all the time right so we've taken the asynchronous bias of digital technology and kind of forgotten about that and used it the opposite way because the beauty of the net in those early days was how smart everybody sounded when you when you engaged online well you used to use modems it was a whole other world that most have you probably never even been exposed to right you would you would log on to your computer you'd plug it into the phone line you would log on to a computer that was elsewhere on the network you would download the conversation that was in progress and then you would engage in your own time you would read this long bulletin board conversation with all these smart people and then you would think for hours or even overnight how am I going to contribute what am I going to say you know and then you craft this perfect paragraph or two over time and then you upload it again you'd log back in and upload it and see how people responded to what you said the strange thing about the net was you sounded smarter online than you did in real life I mean imagine that the internet was a place where you sounded more intelligent than you do in real life and that was what Richard didn't want to have happen here he wanted people to have to oh no you're not going to get that digital advantage you're not gonna all get to sound like Christopher Hitchens or William F Buckley or something you're gonna have to get up there and just do this thing in real time which is tricky right it's the thing that we that we tend not to not to want to pay attention to anymore it's the thing that we're that we're losing touch with in a sense right when I first engaged with the internet not only was it a place where we could now program our time it was a place where we could program and the in the back in the day with computers were as easy to program as they were to use the first time I ever used a computer it was in a seventh grade computer lab where we basically used basic and the first time I had to save a file it asked me are you saving this as a read-only file or a readwrite file I was like what do they mean by that that was a real only filed something that people can look at or is it a readwrite file something that other people can look at and change and edit oh my gosh it was a profound moment for me because then I looked at television and I said oh my gosh you mean these are all being saved as read-only files but they could have been readwrite files I start looking at everything that way I looked at the law of that way I looked at the Torah that way I looked at money that wait a minute these are read-only files but they're only read-only files cuz they were saved that way actually we live in a readwrite universe it's a readwrite world it could be if it wasn't locked down as read-only so there was this there was this sense of of not just wonder but power you know I walked out into the New York City streets and saw the grid pattern there and for the first time understood that the grid pattern of New York City streets that's not just City right that's New York City that was designed by specific people it's a grid pattern not through some nature didn't just evolve it didn't come out of the ground that way where people decided that's a program and the whole world started to look like programs not in a bad way it was just embedded embedded with logic you know the way this building is structured we'll hear about from an architect today the way this building is structured in the way the hallways are there's certain ideas about about society about how things should be everything started to look like a program and everything looked up for grabs everything looked open-source in one way or another but as digital technology evolved it seemed to be much much less about that you know just as Ted was less about the live moment about programming this live interaction between people the net seemed less of an invitation to participate and more of an invitation to consume you know when you you average kid today you know you look at Facebook and you think oh this is look at this place Facebook is here to help me make friends isn't that great you know this is what this is for right the distance between the user and the program is so great we don't even know what the programs were using her for I talked to little Johnny and he thinks the Facebook's there to help him make friends you go to Facebook what do you think they're talking about there how are we going to help little Johnny make more friends deeper lasting human relationships know they're there they're thinking how are we going to monetize Johnny's social graph right how are we going to use big data to predict what Johnny's gonna do and then sell Johnny's future to himself before he knows he's there himself not evil or pernicious it's just what it is right so our relationship to technology became one of a consumer relationship to this technology rather than one of of craftspeople of participants we stopped looking at how can we use technology to create an exchange value with one another and more about how can I if I am gonna learn technology how am I going to learn it in order to get a job in order to sell my time to some company and then come home and buy other stuff from some other company right it's not about seeing some kind of a Burning Man Etsy like peer-to-peer real-time transactional universe with alternative currencies which of course is completely possible with the authentication on a cell phone but rather how am I going to be a better consumer and a better worker which brings me to education and when I look at the way the net is currently being used to disrupt education it seems to be disrupting it from the perspective of a consumer to the content provider so I look at all these great disintermediating technologies through which people can now download the courses of great professors you know when education and we've just gotten to the place in education where we were realizing Oh education needs to be a bit more constructivist and participatory and the professor is not the provider of information he's actually someone who can bring out a conversation and create engagement just when we're getting there in the real classroom we take the internet the great equalizer the great peer-to-peer platform and we say oh this is a way to reify that kind of hero worship oh there's that great professor who's gotten a hundred thousand downloads on his lecture that's the way you can learn you don't need to go to some school and whatever and pay that money and give them your time and follow the path that they've prescribed just because they've developed that discipline over 500 years isn't any reason you should look at it as anything but an abuse of your you know god-given agency to pick your own course and do your own thing no come to the new ala carte universe of the Internet University and download that great thing and meanwhile if you look at the articles and blogs that the professor's are writing they have to prepare there's their speeches where they're scripted right they've got to go into absolutely scripted mode and teleprompter every move everything they do right they lose all of the live interaction they don't have nodding heads they don't form rapport with another person and in the real world they can't see the people's pupils are dilating or constricting it's one performance it's lockdown or to me that's not the opportunity of digital education but the opportunity of digital education is building platforms through which people can create cultures of learning peer to peer cultures of learning it's different from going to a classroom with a professor which should be preserved which should be something it's a different thing it's about a peer-to-peer culture of learning that's no longer about money it's no longer about downloading some piece of information you know the the most successful companies I see and organizations I see in this space are ones that are creating platforms right they look more like Etsy than they do like MIT right they're platforms where people can now exchange data and be teachers to one another not worrying about oh am I getting credit and money for this no we're part of a culture of learning moving forward the other thing I find very encouraging online is the teaching of computers online but if there's one thing to teach with computers its computers that's a great thing I don't want to be learning my Aristotle on it on an online discussion board but I would I would like learning my programming there it's a great place it's a site-specific place to teach code but there's really three kinds of Education that coding should be and should inspire right the first is coding as engineering right learn the language here's the course in Python here's a course in Java and here's how to do it nice interact teach coding as engineering the skill of coding right the second thing is code as a liberal art which is maybe more important for most people these days how do I think critically about coding environments how do I think critically about Facebook about Twitter how does this interface make me feel what is it biased for what is it doing what are the economics behind it what are the embedded agendas how could they be tweaked how could this be used effectively the same way we look at literature the same way we look at architecture the same way we look at art we should be able to look at our platforms that are programmed environments and finally and maybe most importantly is programming as culture the internet as culture what does it mean to move from a passive industrial age employee consumer role to one of a creator in a peer-to-peer society what does it mean to live in a readwrite universe what does it mean to have virtual representation and real-life representation how do I use these right not one or the other but how do I use both of them as I move forward right for me it's become about exploiting every opportunity I have with real people in the real world to connect on this level that's becoming increasingly rare right and then leaving the online space leaving the digital space for what it is right and that's hard to do right it's hard to maintain eye-contact when we're in a space that's designed for you know video replication right but it can be done it can be when you do it boy you know you reconnect to something else okay that's enough from me thanks a lot and take care have a good day

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 19,195

Keywords: ted talk, ted talks, tedx talks, tedx, usa, ted, tedxnyed, tedx talk, english, ted x

Id: _z2oFCR-0pc

Length: 13min 30sec (810 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 11 2013