About the book
Douglas Rushkoff's term for the anxiety of living in a culture that is always on and updating in real time is present shock. He argues that presentism has replaced futurism as society's ethos, and looks at news media, brands, political movements and pop culture, especially after Y2K. Among the ideas he develops are narrative collapse, the loss of patience for linear stories; digiphrenia, the strain of managing several digital selves at once; overwinding, the squeezing of long spans of time into the present; fractalnoia, the struggle to find patterns in too much data; and apocalypto, the pull of doomsday themes. Some critics see it as an update of Alvin Toffler's Future Shock. It was published in 2013.
Walter Isaacson praised Rushkoff for neither condemning nor celebrating the digital age, and for showing how it has fixed attention on the immediate moment in ways that can disorient or energize.
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Walter Isaacson (Author)
This is a wondrously thought-provoking book. Unlike other social theorists who either mindlessly decry or celebrate the digital age, Rushkoff explores how it has caused a focus on the immediate moment that can be both disorienting or energizing. In an era that seems intent on deleting the art of narrative, Rushkoff creates a compelling narrative of the way we now live.
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Sources
- Present Shock - review