Douglas Rushkoff response to Marc Prensky

Interesting, Marc. Your description of the ideal Digital Nation speed and format for you ends up sounding very much like - surprise surprise - the Internet itself! Which may, indeed, be the ideal form for this content.

But is the point/counterpoint yes/no style of inquiry the best or the only way of approaching the material? It's definitely the bias of most net conversations, which - like the binary code on which it is written - tends toward polarized discussion. And while there is some of that in the show (folks like you, Gee, and Henry Jenkins standing up for the possibility of a new human being who may not actually require the traditional skills associated with literate culture) I was hoping we would avoid the answerable "is it a good thing or a bad thing" conundrum and move straight to the "what the heck is the thing that's happening to us all, anyway?"

And is the slowness an issue of the film's pacing, or of your speeding up? Does too much time to contemplate make you...uneasy? ;) ...

I suppose it's hard to look at the effects of any technology or change without it seeming like the humans are the passive players in the equation. And this is part of what makes the film a bit chilling in places, I'd offer. But chapters like Feed Me Bubbe, Warcraft players forging true relationships, kids in the Bronx connecting to education, all do tell the story of people finding great joy, development and self-expression through this stuff.

I'm not really the filmmaker here - more the media theorist depending on Rachel's skills in storytelling - but I do agree with a larger point that you're making. Does this style of inquiry, and the "news" format of a documentary program make "problems" out of what are mere phenomena? Perhaps.

But with a subject as pervasive as life on the digital frontier - the seeming inevitability of our migration into these spaces - does engender a certain trepidation. I haven't dealt with any of it myself as a father, yet, but I know Rachel is dealing with many of these issues on a daily basis as her kids move deeper into the cyber realm and further from the kinds of media and experiences that she considers most meaningful - or at least not ready for the junk heap.

But your thoughts occurred to me throughout the making of the film. One place I totally agree with your assessment would be Kamo, the MIT student, who (along with Sherry Turkle) describes the way he writes papers: one paragraph at a time, with each paragraph making a point unrelated to the next. His essays have no throughline. And I felt myself asking, "well, as a writer I actually know that experience of writing unrelated paragraphs. And because I am trained to do so, I construct a narrative pathway later. Because I know that this connective thread is a requirement of the publications for whom I'm writing, even if that narrative thread is somewhat arbitrary. Does that mean Kamo's writing, on a certain level, is more honest and more advanced than my own? Is it a valid form of a written communication, capable of lateral connections and resonances that linear writing lacks?"

But that might be the next level of conversation. Not "the facts, ma'am," that we show in the film, but the kind of conversations we were hoping the film might start, in places like this one.