The first step toward maintaining autonomy in any programmed environment is to be aware that there's programming going on. It's as simple as understanding the commercials are there to help sell things. And that TV shows are there to sell commercials, and so on.
Interpretation
Awareness of the underlying programming in our environment is essential for maintaining autonomy.
Douglas Rushkoff's quote emphasizes the importance of recognizing the influences and programming in our media-rich environment. By understanding that television shows and commercials are designed with ulterior motives, we empower ourselves to maintain our autonomy and make informed choices rather than being passively influenced by the content we consume.
In practice
In a discussion about media literacy, this quote can help illustrate the importance of critical thinking.
Like most early enthusiasts, I always thought the way the Internet encouraged multitasking made users less vulnerable to manipulation, while simultaneously exploiting even more of our brain's capacity than before. Apparently not.
The faux now of Twitter updates and things pinging at you - all the pulses from digitality that we try to keep up with because we sense that there's something going on that we need to tap into - are artifacts, or symptoms of living in this atemporal reality. And it's not any worse than living in the 'time is money' reality that we're leaving.
Treating an age group as a demographic requires coming up with something that's common to every single one of them. Right?... So it's reductionist in that it reduces an entire segment of civilization down to one person with one habit.
Brains are tricky and adaptable organs. For all the 'neuroplasticity' allowing our brains to reconfigure themselves to the biases of our computers, we are just as neuroplastic in our ability to eventually recover and adapt.
As popular culture becomes more presentist, we move away from entertainment as the vicarious experience of a narrative - as watching someone else's story - and much more toward enacting one's own story. Moving away from myths and toward fantasy role-playing games, away from movies and toward videogames.
If the clockwork universe equated the human body with the mechanics of the clock, the digital universe now equates human consciousness with the processing of the computer. We joke that things don't compute, that we need a reboot, or that our memory has been wiped.
It would be possible to describe everything scientifically, but it would make no sense; it would be without meaning, as if you described a Beethoven symphony as a variation of wave pressure.
You in the West have been sold the idea that the only options in the Arab world are between authoritarian regimes and Islamic jihadists. That's obviously bogus.
Now and again, it is necessary to seclude yourself among deep mountain and hidden valleys to restore your link to the source of life.
Jails and prisons are designed to break human beings, to convert the population into specimens in a zoo - obedient to our keepers, but dangerous to each other.
But she knew that no matter what beauty lay behind, it must remain there. No one could go forward with a load of aching memories.
People almost invariably arrive at their beliefs not on the basis of proof but on the basis of what they find attractive.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.