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.
Interpretation
The quote discusses the shift in entertainment from narratives created by others to personal experiences in interactive forms like video games.
Douglas Rushkoff highlights the evolution of popular culture, suggesting that there has been a significant shift from traditional storytelling—where audiences immerse themselves in the stories of others—to a more participatory form of entertainment, such as video games, where individuals create and enact their own narratives. This transition signifies broader changes in how people engage with stories and experiences, moving from collective mythologies to individual fantasies and experiences.
In practice
In a discussion about the evolution of games in a media studies class.
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.
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.
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.
There are a great many colored people who are ashamed of the cake-walk, but I think they ought to be proud of it.
India is a country that lives in several centuries simultaneously, and her people at any given time and place encapsulate all the contradictions that come from being a multi-cultural, multi-religious and multi-lingual society.
Puerto Rico is the perfect meeting place between Spain, the country I come from, and America, the country where I now belong. The meeting point of two worlds where magic can happen.
I'm a product of my Irish culture, and I could no more lose that than I could my sense of identity.
We usually forget that apart from making a living on this earth, human beings live in societies and these societies have cultures. It is only through having cultures that mankind on this earth has an ordered and meaningful life. Music and drama are two of the many important manifestation of a culture. They are important because they represent the expressions emanating from the power of human artistic creativity
The roots of India's soft power run deep. India's is a civilization that, over millennia, has offered refuge and, more importantly, religious and cultural freedom, to Jews, Parsis, several varieties of Christians, and Muslims.
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