We are all born mad. Some remain so.
I’m what they call a media ecologist, so I believe in media environments — both explicit ones and implicit ones. So it’s like the lightbulb is a media environment, right? You turn on the lightbulb, and you have a different environment because of that medium. But print is a media environment that encourages certain ways of looking at the world. Television changes us. Internet is a media environment. Somehow our media environment, combined with our economic environment, can really amplify one another’s effects in dangerous ways.
Way back in the mid-1990s — when Wired announced that we’re living in an attention economy, when everyone came up with these metrics to measure eyeball hours and the “stickiness” of websites — there was this competition to get our attention. Parallel to that is the sudden emergence of all these attention disorders and new prescriptions for Ritalin. So I’m thinking, we’re living in an attention economy, in which it’s been declared by Wall Street that the one commodity we’ve got to extend in order to make more money is human attention. And then we start drugging our children to pay more attention. I can’t help but worry. Not that there’s a specific conspiracy — Oh, let’s drug the children so they pay more attention — but rather, we’re living in a world where the brunt of our technological know-how is being spent on maintaining attention. Kids start to show these defense mechanisms against paying attention.
{ Douglas Rushkoff interviewed by Samantha Hinds | Continue reading }
photo { Christian Patterson }
