I’m working on a new book about digital economics, tentatively entitled “Distributed.” I’m writing a sci-fi/techno/spiritual/fantasy screenplay for a real Hollywood studio, and I’m getting ready for my first courses at CUNY/Queens this fall. 

That’s the biggie. As of this Fall, I’ll be a Full Professor of Media Studies at CUNY/Queens, the public university of New York City. I’m teaching undergraduates as well as helping start a new Graduate Program in Media Studies, specifically targeted at activists and others who want to create change through media. See: http://www.qc.cuny.edu/Academics/Degrees/DAH/MediaStudies/Pages/MAinMediaStudies.aspx

The idea is that media studies for the 20th Century was largely about reception: how we can “read” media such as TV and radio in order to better assess its intent and influence. Now that we’re in an interactive era, I think media studies has a lot more to do with how we create media, from email and tweets to journalism and movies. As I explained in the press release about the new program, “the essential skill in a digital age is to understand the biases of the landscape – to be able to think critically and act purposefully with these tools – lest the tools and companies behind them use us instead.”

It’s a truly fabulous department with an activist and intellectual bias, from Richard Maxwell (the leading scholar in the environmental impact of digital media devices and production) to Mara Einstein (Compassion Inc and Brands of Faith) to Amy Herzog (working on peep show arcades of 1970’s Times Square) to filmmaker Zoe Beloff to feminist and queer studies genius Joy Fu qua. And those are just the ones I’ve gotten to meet so far. 

Anyway, the big news is YOU CAN STUDY WITH ME NOW, EASILY AND CHEAPLY. You can even take undergraduate or graduate courses at CUNY/Queens as a non-matriculated student, which means a la carte. That’s one of the main reasons I picked this school. I get a few emails a week from people asking how they can study with me, work on projects, or do some reading with me. Most schools require students to be full-time, and charge tens of thousand a year for the privilege. I wanted to be able to look into the faces of students across the seminar table without worrying that I was putting them in life-long debt. 

So now is our chance. The undergraduate course is almost full, but the graduate course is not. Here they are, as well as how to register. You can also find application materials to join the program and get a Masters degree - in class schedules designed to let you have a job while you study. 

In this 15-week course, students will be exposed to the practice of propaganda as well as the assumptions underlying its use. What does the intentional application of propaganda techniques say about the governments and institutions using it, and what does its effectiveness say about the populations on which it is being practiced? Instead of taking a strictly historical approach, we will explore propaganda by venue and medium, including spectacle, atmospherics, television, and social media. For instance, in studying the use of spectacle we will compare the Roman games to the Nuremberg Rallies to an NFL football game. Our study of atmospherics will include Victorian The Crystal Palace, the 1964 Worlds Fair (which took place next door to this college), and Disneyworld. We will give particular focus to the migration of propaganda techniques between governments and corporations, as well as the way propaganda changes the greater media landscape of a society.

The emergence of interactive technologies has profoundly altered our relationship to media and art from the position of passive spectators to that of active players - at least potentially. For longer than we might imagine, cultural theorists have foreseen these shifts, feared them, fought for them, celebrated them, and, clearly, misunderstood them. In this seminar, we will explore the thread of interactivity in cultural media as well as the opportunities and perils posed by the associated rise of mass interpretation, authorship, and bottom-up organization. It is our purpose not only to understand theories on interactive media as they emerged, but also to be capable of developing and arguing our own theoretical approaches.

How do you enroll? If you are already in a CUNY school, just sign up through the course catalogue. I will be accepting qualified undergraduates into the graduate seminar for the first semester or two. If you want to take either of my courses as a non-matriculated student, apply for non-matirculated status here http://www.qc.cuny.edu/admissions/graduate/applying/Pages/Non-Matriculation.aspx (they make it look hard but it’s very easy), and then, simply email me and I’ll put you in the course. 

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Meanwhile, I’ve been writing and speaking a whole lot. I will update more frequently as soon as I get my head above water. I met some spectacular digital anarchists in Barcelona - though they might consider themselves cooperatives or commoners rather than anarchists. Still, the feeling was of a people’s revolution. If you are near there, do check them out http://whois--x.net/   

Also inspired lately by Richard Maxwell and Toby Miller’s piece in Psychology Today, “Don’t Be Fooled by the Abundance of Green Apps,” which is filled with facts such as "when we aggregate the electricity it takes to watch one hour of video streaming via broadband systems of server warehouses and telecommunications networks, we discover that an individual mobile device uses more electricity than two new refrigerators.” http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/greening-the-media/201407/don-t-be-fooled-the-abundance-green-apps

Also: Generation Like, my PBS Frontline documentary will be re-airing on August 5, nationally. 

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And to close, here’s a little something I wrote for a new Science and Technology magazine out of Europe: 

Scientists have to keep their distance from the growing impatience of the modern world, says Douglas Rushkoff.

If you get run over by a car or crack the containment shell around a nuclear reactor, you would most definitely want to avail yourself of the best that science has to offer. When your child gets a staph infection, it’s time for an antibiotic. When an oil tanker hits an iceberg and starts hemorrhaging, it’s time to call in the petroleum engineers.

That’s because scientists, as well as most of the technologies that arise from their research, are optimised for crisis. But is science as well positioned to prevent such calamities in the first place? Not with its current biases, I’m afraid.

Rather, I believe our scientific community is suffering from a symptom of what I have been calling “present shock” – the understandable but often self-defeating impulse to focus on what is happening right now, at the expense of everything else.

In finance, it takes the form of ultra-fast trading, which favours short-term extraction over long-term investment – ultimately robbing markets of their vitality. In digital media, it’s smartphones that interrupt us with trivial news, distracting us from our real work and relationships.

And for science, it’s an emphasis on obvious fixes to calamity, rather than long-term approaches to prevention. So in medicine, for example, we have developed some terrific chemotherapies for cancer, while refusing to grant serious attention to the role of nutrition, herbs or, dare I even mention them, chiropractic and homeopathy on a patient’s wellness. The real abhorrence of such modalities may have less to do with unscientific foundations than with their paucity of dramatic results. A patient population that is less likely to contract cancer or diabetes may be a statistical victory, but it’s hardly as dramatic as a cure.

It’s also less business friendly, which may be a contributing factor to this focus on crisis management. Sciences of prevention are often more time-consuming but less expensive or even unpatentable. Who is going to profit from the discovery that increasing one’s exposure to daylight reduces depression, or that limiting weeks doing “shift” work can reduce rates of cancer? SSRIs (selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors) are a more lucrative form of depression management than probiotics, and recombinant DNA therapy costs far more than writing up a new work schedule.

It’s just that the expensive approaches tend to work only after the fact. After all, only those already in a major crisis are willing to spend that sort of money. Thus, science comes to the rescue of a global topsoil depletion crisis, itself created by short-sighted application of science to agriculture. Ancient practices such as crop rotation, biodynamics or permaculture farming were deemed unscientific – even though they were developed over centuries of real world testing. Supposedly scientific synthetic fertilisers and mechanical soil management had no long-term studies before they were implemented.

Even when mainstream science takes the long view, as it has almost unanimously done over climate change, this only happens when there is a glaring crisis on the horizon. Dependence on apocalyptic thinking is one of the most destructive forms of present shock, and it’s the result of an intolerance for situations with no clear outcome, no winner or loser, no final “result”. It makes people and institutions almost constitutionally incapable of contending with chronic problems, adopting sustainable approaches, or even seeing sustenance as a victory in itself.

Unlike businesses and politicians, who have been forced by an always-on media to react to every bump in the road, science must take the long view. By engaging this discipline, science – as well as the technologies it inspires – stands a chance of reclaiming its place as a deliberate inquiry, capable of helping us avoid crises instead of just fixing them.