Present Shock, by Douglas Rushkoff

Everywhere I look these days people are looking down. Not out or up or over there, but down. And everyone is doing it: my colleagues in meetings at work, my students as they walk to class, the businesspeople who stride by my house every morning on their way to the train, and my own kids whenever they have a minute free. Heck, even the guy standing next to me at the urinal is doing it. What are they looking at? Their smartphones, of course. And what are they doing? Texting and tweeting and Skyping and watching YouTube and playing video games and checking news feeds and selling stock and buying shoes and reading comments by thousands of “friends” they have never met.

But do smartphones and other digital technology make us smarter or happier? Have the recent breakthroughs in communication technology improved the quality of our lives? These are the questions media guru Douglas Rushkoff takes on in Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now. The answer is no—and yes. Rushkoff calls our culture of hyperdistraction “digiphrenia” because new technologies and media reward multitasking and encourage us to be many places at the same time.

After reviewing the history of technology over the last few centuries, Rushkoff focuses primarily on the digital tech boom of the last 20 years and on how it has affected human behavior. The thematic heart of the book is suggested by the title. Recent technology has indeed radically altered how we understand, measure and use time. Rushkoff reimagines a new kind of presence, a multipresence that is seemingly antithetical to any spiritual or religious connotations of the word. This presence is best described as frantic convenience, as “desperate immediacy” and “always-on urgency.” We are “of the moment but not in it,” and this new “nowness” leaves us feeling “distracted, peripheral, even schizophrenic.”