Douglas Rushkoff response to Mark Bauerlein

I guess that's the bias of television, in general, too. We can show 45 minutes of people getting smarter, recovering from post-traumatic stress disorder, or turning a school from failing to fantastic - but then five minutes of a Korean videogaming casualty getting addiction therapy ends up having a whole lot more impact.

Interesting. That was the spectrum that we, as filmmakers, kept finding ourselves on, too - no matter how hard we tried to avoid it. We kept working to keep looking at things without falling into "is this a good thing or a bad thing?" But somehow when you find out the brain is changing in one way or another, or that the military is using a technology to get kids interested in enlisting, or that nearly every study seems to indicate that we don't operate nearly as efficiently as we believe, well, it gets scary.

So you repress the scary part, or try to focus on the kinds of things Professor Gee says: this is an adventure, we've gone through such challenges before, and humanity always comes out okay.

Then you see something else - like the fact that people will surrender in negotiations if the avatar standing across from them is two inches taller in a virtual simulation. Or that this will carry over into the real world. And then you think about who is paying for such knowledge, or utilizing it. And then things get scary again.

I've been thinking for 20 years about why people get so scared of this stuff, and how to help them from giving into that fear. Because it's not really the technology itself but how the technology is used. It's not the web, or even social networking, but the fact that kids are interacting with Facebook - a company desperate to monetize kids' behavior by any means necessary.