“We are sexy”, says Rushkoff | Keynote video, and reflection by Karen Zill
In his July 24 address at the NAMLE conference, keynote speaker Douglas Rushkoff said he felt inspired by how “sexy” media literacy has become. The term “media literacy” used to make eyes glaze over; it sounded like something that came from the parent/establishment world, but now it’s a fertile cultural source—“a weird, cross-pollinating thing, something iconoclastic that’s going to make people raise questions.” Rushkoff cited the argument made in the past by Walter Lippmann who said that public relations was necessary to help the public make choices and that democracy was not possible. John Dewey countered that argument, saying that some development in the future might come to the aid of democracy. That development, offered Rushkoff, may be the Internet.
As a 7th grader, Rushkoff said, he realized that everything is programmed — in other words, that many things in our environment are determined by choices being made by someone. This is true for the built environment as well as the media environment. When it comes to the latter, we have become “end users” or consumers; we see things as given, pre-existing, and set in stone. With any technology we need to understand the “bias” of that technology. The gun, for example, is biased toward killing people; the car is biased toward mobility.
Digital technology is production biased, not consumption biased. With that bias in mind, Rushkoff made the case for teaching programming , that is, teaching not only critical thinking about digital technology but also teaching about the technology itself, turning “consumers” into active users. As a production-biased technology, digital technology incorporates a number of sub-biases:
- Being asynchronous, it is biased away from time;
- It is biased toward distance; great for long-distance, but not for close-up, communication;
- It is biased toward choice: prompts appearing on the screen force a choice;
- It is biased away from complexity, toward scale, and toward openness.
Much of Rushkoff’s talk is contained in his latest book, Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age, a slim volume packed with thoughtful guidelines for anyone who uses digital technology, and , like his keynote speech, deeply inspiring. A highly-recommended read for our digital age.
- Karen Zill is an educational media consultant and freelance writer and editor. She writes discussion guides and educational materials, and helps develop outreach campaigns for PBS and other educational program producers. A former NAMLE board member, she is the Communications Chair for the 2011 NAMLE conference. Karen can be contacted at: kzill@namle.net
Category: 2011 Conference, NAMLE Conference Blog
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