Present Shock cover by Douglas Rushkoff

Douglas Rushkoff’s next book Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now will be published March 21, 2013.

Rushkoff discussed the idea of present shock back in 2010 The Edge Annual Question — 2010:

By surrendering my natural rhythms to the immediacy of my networks, I am optimizing myself and my thinking to my technologies — rather than the other way around. I feel as though I speeding up, when I am actually just becoming less productive, less thoughtful, and less capable of asserting any agency over the world in which I live. The result something akin to future shock. Only in our era, it’s more of a present shock.

I try to look at the positive: Our Internet-enabled emphasis on the present may have liberated us from the 20th century’s dangerously compelling ideological narratives. No one — well, hardly anyone — can still be persuaded that brutal means are justified by mythological ends. And people are less likely to believe employers’ and corporations’ false promises of future rewards for years of loyalty now.

But, for me anyway, it has not actually brought me into greater awareness of what is going on around me. I am not approaching some Zen state of an infinite moment, completely at one with my surroundings, connected to others, and aware of myself on any fundamental level.

Rather, I am increasingly in a distracted present, where forces on the periphery are magnified and those immediately before me are ignored.

He also discussed some of these themes in an interview in New Inquiry last May.

See also: Alex Pang‘s idea of Contemplative Computing. Pang has a book forthcoming as well.