People spent the twentieth century obsessed with the future. We created technologies that would help connect us faster, gather news, map the planet, and compile knowledge. We strove for an instantaneous network where time and space could be compressed. Well, the future's arrived. We live in a continuous now enabled by Twitter, email, and a so-called real-time technological shift. Yet this "now" is an elusive goal that we can never quite reach. And the dissonance between our digital selves and our analog bodies has thrown us into a new state of anxiety: present shock.

Autorentext
Douglas Ruskoff's previous books, including Cyberia and Media Virus, have been translated into thirteen languages. He is the Technology and Culture Consultant to the United Nations Commission on World Culture and a regular consultant to Fortune 500 companies, and he writes a bi-weekly column for the New York Times syndicate. He teaches at the Esalen Institute and Banff Center for the Arts, and will be adjunct professor of Media Sociology at New York University in 1999. He lives in New York City.

Zusammenfassung
This is a wondrously thought-provoking book. Unlike other social theorists who either mindlessly decry or celebrate the digital age, Rushkof f explores how it has caused a focus on the immediate moment that can be both disorienting and energizing.
Walter Isaacson, author of Steve Jobs

Rushkoff gives readers a healthy dose of perspective, insight, and critical analysis that s sure to get minds spinning and tongues wagging.
Publishers Weekly (starred review)

In this refreshing antidote to promises of digital Utopia, Rushkoff articulates his own well-informed second thoughts. We should pay close attention while we still can.
George Dyson, author of Turing s Cathedral and Darwin Among the Machines

If you read one book next year to help you make sense of the present moment, let it be Present Shock.
Anthony Wing Kosner, Forbes.com

Present Shock holds up new lenses and offers new narratives about what might be happening to us and why, compelling readers to look at the larger repercussions of today s technologically mediated social practices, from texting to checking in with a location-based service, jet-lag to The Simpsons, in new ways.
Howard Rheingold, author of Net Smart

A wide-ranging social and cultural critique, Present Shock artfully weaves through many different materials as it makes its point: we are exhilarated, drugged, and consumed by the now. But we need to attend to the future before us and embrace the present in a more constructive way.
Sherry Turkle, author of Alone Together

With brilliant insight Rushkoff once again gets there early, making us confront the new world of presentism the shif t in our focus from the future to the present, from the horizon-gazing to the experience of here and now. He points to signs of presentism all around us in how we conduct politics, interact with media, and negotiate relationships.
Marina Gorbis, executive director, Institute for the Future

Leseprobe

PREFACE

He is one of the most prescient hedge fund managers on Wall Street, but his trades always seem to happen after the fact. That s because as soon as he executes an order, it is observed and preempted by traders at bigger firms with faster computers. The spread changes, and his buy order goes through just a few fractions of a penny higher than it should have. He is trading in the past, longing for the software and geeks he needs to get into his competitors present. And his clients can no longer conceive of investing in a company s future, anyway; they want to win on the trade itself, as it actually happens.

She s at a bar on Manhattan s Upper East Side, but she seems oblivious to the boys and the music. Instead of engaging with those around her, she s scrolling through text messages on her phone, from friends at other parties across town. She needs to know if the event she s at is the event to be at, or whether something better is happening at that very moment, somewhere else. Sure enough, a blip on the tiny screen catches her interest, and in seconds her posse is in a cab headed for the East Village. She arrives at a seemingly identical party and decides it s the place to be, yet instead of enjoying it, she turns her phone around, activates the camera, and proceeds to take pictures of herself and her friends for the next hour instantly uploading them for the world to see her in the moment.

He sees the signs all around him: the latest natural disaster on the evening news; the fluctuations in the prices at the gas pump; talk of a single world currency. Information overload might not have increased the rate at which disasters occur, but it has exponentially increased the rate at which they re witnessed. As a result, prophecy no longer feels like a description of the future but, rather, a guide to the present. The ideas of quantum physicists and the Mayans have been twisted to indicate that time itself will soon be coming to an end, anyway. The messianic age is no longer something to prepare for; it is a current event. What would Jesus do?

This is the new now.

Our society has reoriented itself to the present moment. Everything is live, real time, and always-on. It s not a mere speeding up, however much our lifestyles and technologies have accelerated the rate at which we attempt to do things. It s more of a diminishment of anything that isn t happening right now and the onslaught of everything that supposedly is.

It s why the world s leading search engine is evolving into a live, customized, and predictive flow of data branded Google Now ; why email is giving way to texting, and why blogs are being superseded by Twitter feeds. It s why kids in school can no longer follow linear arguments; why narrative structure collapsed into reality TV; and why we can t engage in meaningful dialogue about last month s books and music, much less long- term global issues. It s why an economy once based on long- term investment and interest bearing currency can no longer provide capital to those who plan to put it to work for future rewards. It s why so many long for a singularity or a 2012 apocalypse to end linear time altogether and throw us into a posthistoric eternal present no matter the cost to human agency or civilization itself.

But it s also how we find out what s happening on the streets of Iran before CNN can assemble a camera crew. It s what enables an unsatisfied but upwardly mobile executive to quit his job and move with his family to Vermont to make kayaks which he thought he d get to do only once he retired. It s how millions of young people can choose to embody a new activism based in patient consen