Friday Quote: “How’d the present get so tense?”
We wake up to our phones. On Twitter, respected news organizations scramble for civilian breadcrumbs from the latest scandal, retweeting and blogging without pausing to check sources. Meanwhile, on Facebook, one friend “likes” Walmart, another shares a Sandy Hook conspiracy theory, and a third sneers about climate change while Instagramming an unseasonable snowfall. Those same bright screens tuck us in late at night, screwing up our internal rhythms and sleep. Corporations, on a constant quest for growth, and our government, in an eternal war against terrorism, gather up as much of this information as they can, searching for patterns of threat and opportunity.
Still with us? Congratulations, so far you’ve survived the 21st century with an attention span intact. That’s no easy task nowadays: We’ve become so obsessed with chasing the moment, we’re not even living in it, media theorist Douglas Rushkoff argues in his latest book Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now. In Present Shock, Rushkoff attempts to make sense of a world brimming with information but free of context. He posits our society has experienced a fundamental shift in the way we experience time. If the last century was characterized by an infatuation with the future and the Next Big Thing (the title’s a play on Alvin Toffler’s 1970 book Future Shock), modern culture’s favorite tense is present.
And while living in the moment complicates dealing with future problems like climate change, “presentist” culture holds opportunities for environmentalists, too. We’ve given up on some of the ideologies of the 20th century and are beginning to grope at something new. Rushkoff points to Occupy Wall Street as the first fully presentist political movement, one that discards end goals and debates in favor of building consensus and making changes on the ground. And we’re poised to transcend being passive consumers: Technology can enable us to question corporations and find new, more sustainable models of commerce.
This is only an excerpt from a must-read by Darby Minow-Smith at Grist. Read the full story HERE.
