Douglas Rushkoff response to Mark Prensky

So many great thoughts. I'm most activated at the moment by Mark Prensky's ideas:

I get that longhand writing is useless to you. But I also get that my own writing process has changed since I moved from yellow legal pad (my first book, Cyberia) to Microsoft Word to Scrivener to Google Docs. If DragonVoice (speech recognition software) ever starts to work, I suppose my brain-to-word flow will increase again. Great for the volume of my output, but the artificial slowness imposed by longhand forced a certain contemplative process to occur.

Indeed, I should be able to simply type as slowly as I want to - or to pause between sentences. But somehow that option doesn't seem available to me. It's as if the technology (and people behind it, from audience to editors) are demanding I adopt the new pace.

And - for some reason - the contemplation required of earlier writing technologies are now not just unnecessary, but unvalued, even abhorred. I see this everywhere from politics to entertainment. As if thinking itself were an effort to defend obsolete literate culture. It feels to me as if the baby is being thrown out with the bathwater. If thinking and consideration were once elitist activities, now they are no one's.

Perhaps it does come around, eventually. I see that in kids' culture and technology as much as you do. I wrote the first defense of all this stuff, back in 1994 with my book Playing the Future. I argued that we push through, much as Philip describes, compensating for the technology's lacks with other activities or even more technologies. Watching a thousand episodes of a Gundam series or playing a videogame for a year requires a long attention span - or at least something that most adults haven't developed.

But I am not seeing as much of the contemplative, soft, textured engagement emerging from digital culture as I would have expected by now. And I'm not sure if such an extended break in continuity will allow for these more organic and analogue forms of experience to resurface.

Text took a few hundred years to take hold. There was time to adjust. to refashion certain values into new forms. The Israelites took the Torah on the road, but spent a few centuries putting it together before they did.