Douglas Rushkoff response to Henry Jenkins

I want to address Henry Jenkins' response (which I may place earlier in the discussion, if that's okay, where most are voicing their first reactions) - which expresses a place I found myself through much of the filming process. Some of your words are the very things I said to Rachel as we shot - because by temperament and career, Henry, you and I are actually in very similar positions.

There are TV documentaries out there - BBC is just putting together a new four-hour series called The Digital Revolution - that are looking at this phenomenon in all (or at least a lot more) of its breadth. The intent here was a bit less ambitious, at least in the film. And while I can't speak for Rachel who produced and directed, I can honestly say that the starting place was that this stuff is starting to feel inevitable, and many people are uncomfortable with that. Is such discomfort and suspicion merited, or simply a misplaced nostalgia for the obsolete expressions of universal ideas?

And I think Rachel actually went into it more optimistically than I did. I was feeling pretty overwhelmed by the commercialization of the net, the limits of programs like Facebook and the willingness of so many people to submit to their social network profiles as accurate reflections of their identity, and so on. My own concern is that people are relatively unaware of the biases of the technologies they are using.

So Rachel went to find out what - if anything - we actually know about the way digital technology impacts our brains and behaviors. And I looked more at some of the applications through which people are redefining their human connection to one another. What I found, I thought, was rather encouraging: Warcrafters forging real relationships, Philip developing Second Life for people to experience the presence of other people, Bubbe genuinely connecting to people through her videos, and so on. Rachel really did want to go find out that multitasking made up for the so-called shorter attention span. But nobody doing research - even the ones who were looking - were able to find evidence of successful multitasking at play. Does this mean there is no evidence? Not necessarily - but it isn't encouraging. Especially not for the parent of kids going to laptop schools like Rachel, and many many PBS viewers in the same position. This was the kind of investigation they want done so they can make decisions for their families, and what they expect from PBS.

And as we made an honest effort to gauge people's experiences, we couldn't avoid the fact that most are still working hard just to cope with the amount of change, the high level of distraction in their lives, and the relative paucity of time to make more considered responses. The sensibility that your colleague, Sherry Turkle, expresses. I don't think we could approach this material from the perspective that they simply don't know how great this stuff is. There is a commonly held sense of apprehension about just how disjointed things are going to get - one that forces that a good amount of attention be paid. I went to Korea looking for inspiration about our future to bring back to the story, and found a culture and government dedicated to correcting the very ill effects we are just beginning to talk about here. Maybe they are overreacting, but it's where they are at as best I could tell. (And American kids' faces are just as calm and expressionless when they play Starcraft competitively.)

Still, I believe your bigger point about the difference between the website - where we let people speak for themselves - and the documentary, which had a clear (if, in your estimation, tilted and reactionary) perspective - can be safely generalized to the biases of these particular media. It may be part of why - as Marc Prensky argues - linear media might be responsible for driving more people to killing one another - but also why - as Mark Bauerlin might argue - a "legacy" value system is easier to preserve and communicate in slower, linear media with singular voice.

Yes, we went to some extremes: how VR is being used to treat Gulf War vets, and how a different sort of VR is being used to conduct war from the safety of home. And in the latter case, our object wasn't to show that it makes it easy to kill; quite the contrary, these long-distance soldiers suffer the same stress as the ones in the 'real' battlefield. That does tell us something - though I don't think it's that using these technologies is a bad thing. Only that it's tremendously complicated.

Interestingly, most of the traditional media's reviewers have made the opposite point to yours: they feel we didn't answer enough questions, didn't make judgments, didn't find out whether this stuff is "good" or "bad," and didn't make any prescriptions for viewers to takeaway and employ at home.

We really did see the show as a way to initiate conversations - of which this is this first. I hope your dismay over how the documentary ended up won't discourage you from continuing it.