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Douglas Rushkoff - Computers for Humans

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    ♪[Jazz music]♪
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    So yeah, being one of the first
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    net culture or computers in society writers
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    was, strategically, a poor move for me.
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    And I'm living proof, though,
    you can still survive it,
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    if you can get through it somehow,
    by answering e-mail more slowly
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    It's funny,
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    I wrote some notes because I thought
    I should be responsible,
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    because you guys are real computer studies,
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    computer science people,
    as opposed to just,
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    you know,
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    your average,
    digitally illiterate audience.
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    So I don't really need to make the case
    - I probably don't -
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    on why learning something about
    digital technology is a smart thing,
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    because you guys have already
    made that choice.
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    But something that occurred to me
    on the way here, actually,
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    that you might not realize as young people
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    if you don't mind being called that
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    ...is that it's very hard to get
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    an accurate sense of the biases
    of the digital media environment...
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    ...when you've been raised inside it.
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    In other words, what I want
    to suggest to you is that
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    those of us who are old enough to have
    experienced and consciously experienced
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    the shift from a pre-digital media
    environment to a digital media environment
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    actually
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    understand something or sense something
    or experience something
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    about the biases of digital technology
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    that is relatively difficult for those
    of you who have been raised
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    with digital technology to get.
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    Right now this is the opposite argument
    I made through most of my career.
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    In 1995, I wrote a book called,
    Playing the Future, where I argued that,
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    "Don't worry, you grown ups!
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    Digital technology is coming
    and you feel overwhelmed.
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    But you guys are digital immigrants
    whereas kids are digital natives.
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    So you'll speak the language like
    an immigrant, they'll speak like a native.
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    You're always going to feel
    slightly out of place and unsure,
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    and every time you have a hypertext link,
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    you're gonna be a disoriented
    because we're not used to that,
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    whereas kids are going to experience
    that very naturally.
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    That what looks disjointed to us,
    will be a natural terrain for them.
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    And they will have command,
    don't worry, the kids are alright."
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    But as I've grown older, and
    as I've watched where cyberspace has gone,
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    and where our culture has gone, or hasn't,
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    I realize that some of my elders were
    actually more right about this than I was.
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    And in reading all the
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    finally catching up
    with who I was supposed to read,
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    when I was younger, McCluen and Ong,
    and all the great media theorists.
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    I would read about the digital or
    the media environments,
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    and this notion that McCluen had that,
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    if you ask a fish about water he wouldn't
    be able to tell you what it is, right?
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    Because the fish is swimming in the water.
    The fish not aware of the water.
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    If you ask someone who is raised
    in a television environment,
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    "Oh, what about the impact of television
    on you?"
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    You can't say it because you're living
    in it.
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    You're living in that media environment.
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    Likewise, those of us who are living in
    a digital media environment,
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    it's very difficult for us
    to parse its effect,
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    for us to feel what it is
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    for us to understand the difference
    between
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    what it is to be a human being
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    and what it is to be a digital being.
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    And
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    being able to parse it, though,
    being able to begin to look at that
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    What Norbert Weinert used to call,
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    "the human use of human beings."
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    He was one of the first people to talk
    about cybernetics
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    I think he invented the word, actually,
    back when, cybernetics.
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    Even though it got stolen.
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    He was really looking at as we develop
    a computer environment,
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    how will we recognize the difference
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    between humans and the machines
    that we're in?
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    How will we understand how to create
    a human,
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    or a humanity-encouraging,
    digital media environment?
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    Now the reason why I think this
    is important is because most of my peers
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    strongly disagree with this sentiment
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    Most of my peers, and call them
    the sort of,
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    the Negroponte, Kevin Kelley,
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    Wired Magazine, Chris Anderson,
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    all the way to Ray Kurzwhile
    on that spectrum, Clay Shirkey.
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    There's this sense, and I used to have
    some of it,
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    this sort of letter ripped sense
    about technology
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    that is uncomfortably consonant with
    corporate capitalism.
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    But that's another story.
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    That
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    human beings are merely one stage
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    in information's inevitable evolution
    towards greater states of complexity.
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    And they tell this very compelling story
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    about the beginning of time all the way
    through now.
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    That matter has been groping
    toward greater states of complexity.
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    That we had atoms became molecules
    and molecules became
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    sort of these weird pre-proto-life things
    which became cells
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    and now we have this whole life thing
    that happened.
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    And life got very complex
    through evolution
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    and we had people
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    And people built machines,
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    and machines are just sort of in that big
    blue, overtake humanity moment.
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    And when they do,
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    then machines, our computers, our networks
    will be the real host
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    for the evolution of information
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    and we human beings can tend
    to those machines
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    or, at best, upload our consciousness
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    and then they will continue that journey
    for us.
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    You know, and each one has
    a different metaphor for explaining it
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    You know, whether it's Kevin talking about
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    what technology wants, right?
    What technology wants,
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    like it really wants.
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    It's not bias towards something, but
    it wants something,
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    we've made this thing.
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    Just as God made people,
    people made technology,
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    and this child will go on
    wanting something.
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    Or Ray Kurzwhile who will talk
    about the singularity,
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    which I'm sure you've all read
    or heard about, even on,
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    if you find out about it in Vice Magazine
    or anything, at this point
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    The idea that technology reaches
    this point of,
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    not self-consciousness or self-awareness
    necessarily, but it just surpasses us
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    It becomes this thing and can keep going.
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    It's a...
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    for me it's a discomforting view
    of humanity
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    but it's also, I would argue,
    an incorrect one, you know?
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    It's one that is...
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    it's one that is the result of living
    unconsciously in a digital media environment
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    It's one where you let the digital media
    environment dictate
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    what you are and how you think
    about the world
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    rather than maintaining some
    sense of humanity in that.
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    So, what's interesting to me
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    as I look at the history of computing,
    which now we have
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    and as we look at computers in society,
    which is a real thing.
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    I mean, 20 years ago, 10 years ago,
    when we taught courses like this,
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    it was futurism.
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    Computers in Society was a course in,
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    "What's it gonna be like someday
    when people have e-mail?"
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    I mean, there were times, and I'm sure
    you were in those conversations
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    when people like me used to go
    to a cocktail party
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    or go to a publisher,
    or explain to a magazine editor.
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    Someday people are going to have
    their own computers
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    They are gonna send messages to eachother
    using little text editors
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    using, you know, word processors,
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    and they would literally laugh us
    out of the room.
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    They did not, it seemed so outrageous,
    that - Or they'd walk around
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    No, you're not gonna have
    to implant chips in people,
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    they're gonna walk around with phones that
    are gonna track them everywhere they go
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    they're gonna do this voluntarily
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    They're gonna give all their information .
    No one believed us.
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    But, of course that happened.
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    But, the thing to me that's interesting
    about computer history,
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    if we're gonna follow it from
    the history of humanity
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    rather than the history of
    technology, right?
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    Let's not worry about paper tape
    to punch cards to tape to discs
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    to hard drives to RAM.
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    Let's not worry about machine evolution.
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    But you look at the difference
    in people, right?
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    If we look at history as the human story
    rather than the story of stuff
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    then the interesting thing becomes
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    the big switch, I think, is the shift from
    a pre-literate to a literate society.
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    When we look at the impact of
    the printing press.
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    Do we talk about it in terms of
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    "Oh, look!
    These rooms filled up with books!"
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    No, that's not the part
    that's interesting.
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    The part that is interesting is
    people learned to read
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    and then when they learned to read,
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    they had personal interpretations
    of the Bible, right?
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    We had a Protestant Reformation
    with people rebelling against the Church
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    We had the idea of "one man, one vote"
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    because everyone has
    their own perspective.
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    It coincided with prospective painting.
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    It coincided with central banking.
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    And all of these other, very...
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    analogous
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    human inventions that were all about
    people having individual perspectives,
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    "one man, one vote"
    it led to the Enlightenment
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    and all this other stuff consumerism,
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    Industrial Era and everything else.
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    When we look at digital technology
    I think we have to look at it that way.
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    In other words, what is
    the difference between
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    a pre-literate digital society and
    a post-literate digital society?
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    You know, I'm over arguing for
    digital literacy.
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    I think digital literacy is inevitable,
    you know?
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    I feel like I'm making that - when I...
    it's my main talk that I do.
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    It's like "Programmer be programmed!"
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    And I wrote this book,
    Programmer Be Programmed.
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    We have to learn to program.
    If you don't learn how to program,
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    you're just swimming blindly
    in a sea of information.
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    Kids don't understand the biases
    of the technologies they use.
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    If you ask a kid
    what Facebook's for,
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    he'll say Facebook's here
    to help him make friends.
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    But we all know Facebook is
    really not here
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    it's really here to monetize
    the social graft and all that.
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    And then arguing,
    the Chinese are gonna come and take our military
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    and the Iranians are gonna take
    our banking and we gotta take something
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    any argument I can to try to have schools
    teach basic digital literacy in elementary schools
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    junior schools and high schools,
    so that we're not stupid. which we are
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    And it's like arguing, you imagine when
    they invented text
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    Oh we're gonna have to learn 22 letters
    which is 22 letter alphabet at the time
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    we're gonna have to learn these letters
    in order to read
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    Well, let the rabbis read,
    let the kings read, but the people don't
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    have to read, do we, we regular people. yes.
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    it's like people are so confused
    on this angle
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    but we will win this part war.
    just as people learned how to use e-mail
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    and people decided to use phones
    people will eventually, we will teach kids
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    how to use digital technology
    they won't be completely blind
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    the misperception now is that
    learning how to program is kind of like
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    becoming an auto mechanic
    it's like "well I can drive a car"
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    "why do I need to know how
    it actually works"
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    We're not talking about the difference
    between an allround mechanic and a driver
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    we're talking about the difference between
    a driver and a passenger
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    a programmer is the user of the machine
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    If you don't understand the code
    you're not using the machine
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    You are the used You are maybe the customer
    but you're not the producer
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    And that's where you get to the real biases
    of the digital age
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    which are easy for those of us who are
    around before that to get
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    The bias of the digital age,
    of the digital era is toward production
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    That's why it's digital
    where do we even get the word digits from
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    Digits are the fingers.
    They were ten fingers. Digital
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    This is digital media.
    This is media that is constructivist
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    It's media that you make stuff with
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    The media before digital
    was all receive only
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    It was all... they were no
    Do you still read write-only
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    read only files. Is that still existing?
    Oh good
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    For me, when I understood what digital was
    was the first time
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    when I was asked to save a file
    on the Princeton mainframe computer
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    And you had to save a file
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    this is before we used papertape to save
    your program
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    when you actually could save to a disc
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    And it asked me "is this gonna be a
    read-only file?"
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    Is this gonna be a restricted file or
    read-only file or a read/write file?
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    And all of a sudden I went
    "Oh my god"
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    You mean all of this time they could have
    been saving this stuff as read/write
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    And I looked back at the media
    that I had been exposed to
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    I mean, I was a Brady bunch kid
    and television was a read-only medium
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    television and radio, all the broadcast
    medium, all the book, everything I got
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    these were read-only media
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    and now I was stepping into a world where
    we had read/write media
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    Where everything that was put out there
    if it wasn't being made changeable by me
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    Then it was a conscious choice of
    the author to restrict that changeability
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    but the bias was towards me being able
    to copy that file and change it
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    Or not even copy it, just change the file
    that was already there
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    And that kind of flipped it around
    that's when I realized
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    "Oh my gosh. if this really works
    If digital technology really happens
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    Then it will be as big a change on human
    society as text itself
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    It's gonna be that big a flip
    And text was a big flip
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    When we got text
    when we got the 22 letter alphabet
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    We got contracts, we got accountability
    We got the judeo-christian religion
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    We got linear time
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    We got cause and effect ultimately
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    Text allowed us to put something down
    and leave and someone else could read it
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    it changed...
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    if you think about the difference between
    an oral civilization
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    where other people have to be in the room
    with you to get something
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    and a text civilization where you can
    leave it, go and then someone else finds it
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    all of a sudden everything is different
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    This shift that we are undergoing now is
    as big as that
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    and what happens is a -
    certainly the last 600 years
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    but probably the last 2000 years of
    emphasis towards
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    sort of a top-down control of
    not just civilizations
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    but organizations, families and
    pretty much every thing
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    and religion's changes to
    a bottom-up, peer-to-peer conncected
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    not just sensibility but organizational
    structure
Title:
Douglas Rushkoff - Computers for Humans
Description:

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

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Video Language:
English
Team:
Captions Requested
Duration:
01:13:55

English subtitles

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