Ever feel like things are moving too fast? This, according to the book by Douglas Rushkoff, is called “Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now”. This is an important book for engaging in conversations with friends, colleagues, and clients about the fast-lane of the 21st Century. We are being ever pushed around by the technology we create and upgrade to daily. How do we deal with it? Can we slow the pace of our lives down? And what is the price to be paid?
Rushkoff’s analysis is important as a conversation piece; however, I would off-set it with other books, such as Kurzweil’s “The Singularity is Near” and Nicholas Nassim Taleb’s “The Black Swan”, and Stewart Brand’s “Clock of the Long Now”, i.e., books that have a futural perspective, which Rushkoff’s Razor is too quick to cut off in his unflagging and at times myopic focus on the present.
How do you plan in the shock of the short now? How do you ensure that your decisions have a future, are viable, will bring you the success you need? These ideas are important aspects of the work of Kultur Design: helping people and organizations become more creative and innovative while navigating these precarious disruptive times. In the “Present Shock” of our daily work, we do not take ample time for group learning and building plans and conceptual models of what we’ve learned–we are too reactive and not proactive and predictive. In such cases, as Rushkoff’s book helps us understand, we can be swallowed up by the present, and miss the opportunities and disruptions that lie just a little ways ahead.
More reviews in future posts…
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