Douglas Rushkoff - Computers for Humans
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0:00 - 0:07♪[Jazz music]♪
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0:07 - 0:09So yeah, being one of the first
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0:09 - 0:14net culture or computers in society writers
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0:14 - 0:19was, strategically, a poor move for me.
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0:20 - 0:22And I'm living proof, though,
you can still survive it, -
0:22 - 0:27if you can get through it somehow,
by answering e-mail more slowly -
0:29 - 0:30It's funny,
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0:30 - 0:33I wrote some notes because I thought
I should be responsible, -
0:33 - 0:36because you guys are real computer studies,
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0:36 - 0:38computer science people,
as opposed to just, -
0:39 - 0:40you know,
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0:40 - 0:45your average,
digitally illiterate audience. -
0:46 - 0:50So I don't really need to make the case
- I probably don't - -
0:50 - 0:54on why learning something about
digital technology is a smart thing, -
0:54 - 0:57because you guys have already
made that choice. -
0:59 - 1:03But something that occurred to me
on the way here, actually, -
1:03 - 1:06that you might not realize as young people
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1:06 - 1:09if you don't mind being called that
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1:11 - 1:19...is that it's very hard to get a very accurate sense of the biases of the digital media environment...
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1:19 - 1:23...when you've been raised inside it.
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1:23 - 1:34In other words, what I want to suggest to you is that those of us who are old enough to have experienced and consciously experienced
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1:34 - 1:45the shift from a pre-digital media environment to a digital media environment actually understand something
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1:45 - 1:56or sense something or experience something about the biases of digital technology that is relatively difficult for those of you who have been raised
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1:56 - 1:59with digital technology to get.
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1:59 - 2:02Right now this is the opposite argument I made through most of my career.
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2:02 - 2:06In 1995, I wrote a book called, Playing the Future, where I argued that,
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2:06 - 2:11"Don't worry, you grown ups, digital technology is coming and you feel overwhelmed.
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2:11 - 2:15But you guys are digital immigrants whereas kids are digital natives.
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2:15 - 2:19So you're going to speak the language like an immigrant, they're going to speak like a native.
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2:19 - 2:26You're always going to feel slightly out of place and unsure, and everytime you have a hypertext link, you're gonna be a disoriented
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2:26 - 2:30because we're not used to that, whereas kids are going to experience that very naturally.
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2:30 - 2:33That what looks disjointed to us, will be a natural terrain for them.
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2:33 - 2:37And they will have command, don't worry, the kids are alright."
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2:37 - 2:43But as I've grown older, and as I've watched where cyberspace has gone,
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2:43 - 2:52and where our culture has gone, or hasn't, I realize that some of my elders were actually more right about this than I was
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2:52 - 2:57And in reading all the - finally catching up with who I was supposed to read,
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2:57 - 3:01when I was younger, you know, McCluen and Ong, and all the great media theorists, you know,
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3:01 - 3:07I would read about the digital environ- or the media environments, and this notion that McCluen had,
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3:07 - 3:13that, you know, if you ask a fish about water he wouldn't be able to tell you what it is, right?
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3:13 - 3:18Because the fish is swimming in the water. He's not aware of the water.
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3:18 - 3:23You know, so if you ask someone who is raised in a television environment, "Oh, what about the impact television on you?"
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3:23 - 3:29You can't say it because you're living in it. You're living in that media environment.
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3:29 - 3:36Likewise, those of us living in a digital media environment, it's very difficult for us to parse it's effect
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3:36 - 3:39For us to feel what it is
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3:39 - 3:45For us to understand the difference between what it is to be a human being
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3:45 - 3:50and what it is to be a digital being
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3:50 - 3:59And, being able to parse it, though, being able to begin to look at that
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3:59 - 4:08What Norbert Weinert used to call, "the human use of human beings." He was one of the first people to talk about cybernetics
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4:08 - 4:13I think he invented the word, actually, back when, cybernetics. Even though it got stolen.
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4:13 -He was really looking at as we develop a computer environment, how will we recognize what is the difference between humans and the machines that we're in?
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Not SyncedHow will we understand how to create a human, or a humanity-encouraging, digital media environment?
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Not SyncedNow the reason why I think this is important is because most of my peers strongly disagree with this sentiment
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Not SyncedMost of my peers, and call them the sort of, the Negroponte, Kevin Kelley, Wired Magazine, Chris Anderson,
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Not Syncedall the way to Ray Kurzwhile on that spectrum, Clay Shirkey - there's this sense, this sort of letter ripped sense about technology
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Not Syncedthat's uncomfortably consonant with corporate capitalism, but that's another story
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Not SyncedThat human beings are merely one stage in information's inevitable evolution towards greater states of complexity, right?
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Not SyncedAnd they tell this very compelling story about the beginning of time all the way through now.
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Not SyncedThat matter has been groping toward greater states of complexity, right?
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Not SyncedThat we had atoms became molecules, and molecules became, you know, sort of these weird pre-proto-life things which became cells
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Not SyncedAnd now we have this whole life thing that happened
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Not SyncedAnd life got very complex through evolution
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Not SyncedAnd we had people
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Not SyncedAnd people built machines, and machines are just sort of in that big, blue, overtake humanity moment,
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Not Syncedand when they do, then machines, our computers, our networks will be the real host for the evolution of information
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Not Syncedand we human beings can tend to those machines, or, at best, upload our consciousness
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Not Syncedand then they will continue that journey for us
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Not SyncedYou know, and each one has a different metaphor for explaining it
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Not SyncedYou know, whether it's Kevin talking about what technology wants, right? What technology wants, like it really wants.
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Not SyncedNot, it's not bias towards something, but it wants something, we've made this thing.
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Not SyncedJust as God made people, people made technology, and this child will go on wanting something.
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Not SyncedOr Ray Kurzwhile who will talk about the singularity, which I'm sure you've all read or heard about, even on, you know,
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Not Syncedyou can find out about it in Vice Magazine or anything, at this point
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Not SyncedYou know, the idea that technology reaches this point of, not self-consciousness or self-awareness necessarily, but it just surpasses us
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Not SyncedIt becomes this thing and can keep going.
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Not SyncedIt's a... I don't know... for me it's a discomforting view of humanity
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Not Syncedbut it's also, I would argue, an incorrect one, you know?
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Not SyncedIt's one that is - it's one that is a result of living unconsciously in a digital media environment
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Not SyncedIt's one where you let the digital media environment dictate what you are and how you think about the world
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Not Syncedrather than maintaining some sense of humanity in that.
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Not SyncedAlright? So, what's interesting to me as I look at the history of computing, which now we have
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Not Syncedand as we look at computers in society, which is a real thing.
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Not SyncedI mean, 20 years ago, 10 years ago, when we taught courses like this, it was futurism.
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Not SyncedComputers in Society was a course was a course in, "What's it gonna be like someday when people have e-mail?"
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Not SyncedI mean, there were times, and I'm sure you were in those conversations
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Not Syncedwhen people like me used to go to a cocktail party or go to a publisher, or explain to a magazine editor.
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Not SyncedSomeday people are going to have their own computers
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Not SyncedThey are gonna send messages to eachother using little text editors
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Not Syncedusing, you know, word processors,
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Not Syncedand they would literally laugh us out of the room.
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Not SyncedThey did not - they - it seemed so outrageous, that - Or they'd walk around
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Not SyncedNo, you're not gonna have to implant chips in people, they're gonna walk around with phones that are gonna track them everywhere they go
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Not Syncedand they're gonna do this voluntarily
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Not SyncedThey're gonna give all their information - it's all just - and no one believed us. But, of course that happened.
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Not SyncedBut, the thing that's interesting to me about computer history, if we're gonna follow it from the history of humanity
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Not Syncedrather than the history of technology, right? Let's not worry about paper tape to punch cards to tape to discs to hard drives to RAM.
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Not SyncedLet's not worry about machine evolution. But you look at the difference in people, right?
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Not SyncedIf we look at history as the human story rather than the story of stuff
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Not Syncedthen the interesting thing becomes - the big switch, I think, is the shift from a pre-literate to a literate society, right?
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Not SyncedWhen we look at the impact of the printing press.
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Not SyncedDo we talk about it in terms of, "Oh, look! These rooms filled up with books!"
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Not SyncedNo, that's not the part that's interesting.
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Not SyncedThe part that is interesting is people learned to read
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Not Syncedand then when they learned to read, they had personal interpretations of the Bible, right?
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Not SyncedSo we had a Protestant Reformation, with people rebelling against the Church,
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Not SyncedSo we had the idea of "one man, one vote," because everyone has their own perspective.
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Not SyncedIt coincided with prospective painting.
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Not SyncedIt coincided with central banking.
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Not SyncedAnd all of these other, very, analagous human inventions that were all about people having individual perspectives,
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Not Synced"One man, one vote," it led to the Enlightenment, and all this other stuff.
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Not SyncedConsumerism, Industrial Era and everything else.
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Not SyncedWhen we look at digital technology I think we have to look at it that way.
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Not SyncedIn other words, what is the difference between a pre-literate digital society and a post-literate digital society?
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Not SyncedYou know, I'm over arguing for digital literacy. I think digital literacy is inevitable, you know?
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Not SyncedI feel like I'm making that - when I, and I, it's my main talk that I do.
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Not SyncedIt's like, you know, "Programmer be programmed!" And I wrote this book, Programmer Be Programmed.
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Not SyncedWe have to learn to program. If you don't learn how to program, you're just swimming blindly in a sea of information.
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Not SyncedKids don't understand the biases of the technologies they use.
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Not SyncedYou know, if you ask a kid what Facebook is for, he'll say Facebook is here to help him make friends.
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Not SyncedBut we all know Facebook is really not here - it's really here to monetize the social graft and all that.
- Title:
- Douglas Rushkoff - Computers for Humans
- Description:
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DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF talk "Computers for Humans" in the Computers & Society Speaker Series at the Courant Institute NYC on Nov 27 2012.
Users do not know how to program their computers, nor do they care. They spend much more time and energy trying to figure out how to use them to program one another, instead. And this is a potentially grave mistake. Just as the invention of text utterly transformed human society, disconnecting us from much of what we held sacred, our migration to the digital realm will also require a new template for
maintaining our humanity. In this talk, Dr. Douglas Rushkoff -- author of Program or Be Programmed, Life Inc, and the upcoming Present Shock, shares the biases of digital media, and what that means for how we should use and make them.Additional Camera: Brittany Vanbibber
PUNKCAST 2115
http://isoc-ny.org/p2/4502
Webcast Support: NYI http://nyi.net
- Video Language:
- English
- Team:
- Captions Requested
- Duration:
- 01:13:55
jacdez edited English subtitles for Douglas Rushkoff - Computers for Humans | ||
Michel Smits edited English subtitles for Douglas Rushkoff - Computers for Humans | ||
Michel Smits edited English subtitles for Douglas Rushkoff - Computers for Humans | ||
Michel Smits edited English subtitles for Douglas Rushkoff - Computers for Humans | ||
Michel Smits edited English subtitles for Douglas Rushkoff - Computers for Humans | ||
Michel Smits edited English subtitles for Douglas Rushkoff - Computers for Humans | ||
Michel Smits edited English subtitles for Douglas Rushkoff - Computers for Humans | ||
Michel Smits edited English subtitles for Douglas Rushkoff - Computers for Humans |