Nieman Foundation at Harvard
HOME
          
LATEST STORY
The media becomes an activist for democracy
ABOUT                    SUBSCRIBE
June 28, 2013, noon
LINK: cyber.law.harvard.edu  ➚   |   Posted by: Joshua Benton   |   June 28, 2013

If you enjoyed our Q&A with author Douglas Rushkoff — author of Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now — you’ll enjoy this video of Rushkoff speaking at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society last week:

The always-on, simultaneous society in which we have found ourselves has altered our relationship to culture, media, news, politics, economics, and power. We are living in a digital temporal landscape, but instead of exploiting its asynchronous biases, we are misguidedly attempting to extend the time-is-money agenda of the Industrial Age into the current era. The result is a disorienting and dehumanizing mess, where the zombie apocalypse is more comforting to imagine than more of the same. It needn’t be this way. Douglas Rushkoff — teacher, documentarian, journalist, and author — discusses insights from his recent book “Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now” with David Weinberger and a live audience at Harvard.

Show tags
 
Join the 60,000 who get the freshest future-of-journalism news in our daily email.
The media becomes an activist for democracy
“We cannot be neutral about this, by definition. A free press that doesn’t agitate for democracy is an oxymoron.”
Embracing influencers as allies
“News organizations will increasingly rely on digital creators not just as amplifiers but as integral partners in storytelling.”
Action over analysis
“We’ve overindexed on problem articulation, to the point of problem admiring. The risk is that we are analyzing ourselves into inaction and irrelevance.”