Program or be programmed
Best Friday session by far was Douglas Rushkoff's. The early Internet advocate (80's 90's) and now cautious and thoughtful critic (or at least concerned digital citizen) reminded the audience that we have become victims of the many biases established by others (programmers). 140 characters, pre-determined profiles, WP templates, and even files for storing our data. What we don't realize is that as the world becomes more and more dependent on computers that a select few are determining our fate. We either need to become them or be defined by them.
Rushkoff's 10 Commandments:
1. Time: don't be always on. We have lost the benefit of thinking that comes from the original asynchronous nature of the web.
2. Distance: don't do from "afar" (email, texting, 2nd life) what can be done in person or close up. (Do we really text classmates sitting next to us?)
3. Scale: everything does not have to scale, aggregate up, hyper capitalize. All we'll have left are banks that do or make nothing.
4. Discrete: you have the option of choosing none of the above. Don't let Facebook profiles limit your choices, married, single. Remember that digital is not real, it's symbols.
5. Complexity: Thou shalt never be completely right. The net (Wikipedia, joke) reduces complexity and makes everything seem definitive.
6. Non-corporeal: Thou shalt never be anonymous. It is bad for community and social contract. And also, digital communication exclusively eliminates most important form of communication: non-verbal.
7. Contact: contact, not content, is king. We are humans.
8. Abstraction: everything can not be abstracted or derived. Intrinsic values matter more than derived values. The latter leading to flawed assumptions about the real world.
9. Openness: thou shalt not steal. Is there really a free? People create value. It should not be exploited.
10. Program or be programmed: (I could write pages on this, but no time here.) When it comes to devices and apps, stop thinking "what can they do for us," and start thinking "what can we make it do." We don't even teach kids in school programming languages anymore. We teach them Microsoft office.
