Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Book Review: Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now , by Douglas Rushkoff

2015; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 92; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1177/1077699015580560l

2161-430X

Alyssa Appelman,

Digital Games and Media

Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now. Douglas Rushkoff. New York: Penguin Group, 2013. 296 pp. $26.95 pbk.In Present Shock, Douglas Rushkoff provides a high-level overview of the effects of living in today's digital society. professor of media theory and digital economics at City University of New York/Queens, Rushkoff outlines current media and culture trends that he sees as consequences of shock.The title and core concept play off of Alvin Toffler's notion of shock. Rushkoff offers that we have moved past a society that looks ahead, and we are instead in an ultra-presentism era that is only concerned with the very recent past, which we falsely see as the present: [O]ur culture becomes an entropic, static hum of everybody trying capture the slipping book is divided based on the five effects Rushkoff sees of this societal presentism: collapse of narrative, digiphrenia, overwinding, fractalnoia, and apocalypto.He connects the diminishing use of narrative in mass media the rise of postnarrative meta-shows (e.g., Mystery Science Theater 3000, The Simpsons, Community-shows for which viewers need understand the media as a self-reflexive universe of references), reality television, product placement, and online multiplayer games. He talks about the always-on-ness of media and how we feel pressure be constantly connected because our technology is. He talks about the difficulty of seeing a long future or long history when we are so focused on the current moment. He talks about people's innate desire make sense of the nonsensical (i.e., to find patterns in a world with no enduring story lines). Finally, he talks about people taking comfort in end-of-world theories as a means of psychological closure (i.e., At least the annihilation of the human race-or its transmogrification into silicon-resolves the precarious uncertainty of present shock.). He ends with self-reflection on the difficulty of reading and writing a book in an era of shock.Rushkoff makes some arguments about the effect of shock on the news industry and politics that could be particularly useful for students of advanced political communication or journalism. For example, in terms of journalism, he talks about the problem with a 24/7 news cycle: A presentist mediascape may prevent the construction of false and misleading narratives by elites who mean us no good, but it also tends leave everyone looking for direction and responding or overresponding every bump in the road. …