*Midterm Exam*

Douglas Rushkoff makes a lot of arguments in his Program or Be Programed: Ten Commands for the Digital Age. His main argument is that digital technologies as they exist today have a lot of biases. He argues that we need to be aware of these biases so that we can use technology as it was intended to—to have it serve us—instead of letting technology use us. To go along with this, Rushkoff has his ten commands to serve as sub-arguments. They are:

1.     Time- He argues that we should not be “always on”; we should learn to set the technology down a bit.

2.     Place: He argues that digital media is biased toward dislocation and that we should not let this affect our real in-person interactions.

3.     Choice: he argues that technologies only give us a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ choice and that it is possible for us to chose none of the above.

4.     Complexity: He argues that the Internet takes away the complexity of the actual learning since people can “cherry-pick” what they want to know; it is biased toward the reduction in complexity.

5.     Scale: He argues that digital technologies create abstractions of real entities that exist in the world, which can lead to s disconnection between the “here and now”.

6.     Identity: He argues that the anonymity of the online world leads to a disconnection between our real-life and online actions and consequences.

7.     Social: He argues that people should not sell their friends, that we should keep with the internet’s bias toward contact and not let it become into a popularity contest.

8.     Fact: He argues that the internet is biased towards truth, and that it is the truth that is the easiest way to accomplish things.

9.     Openness: He argues that people should be shared and not stolen for personal or monetary gain.

And finally…

10.  Purpose: He argues that people should learn how to program the code that creates these technologies.

The evidence he offers isn’t very “factual” most of the time; it doesn’t point to a specific date or time. His evidence is, however, pretty logical in some ways. For example, when arguing for Time, he talks about digital technologies biased toward asynchronicity. He talks about online conversations and activities and how one can choose when to get out of it, and when to pick it back up. Although there aren’t any real numerical facts in his evidence it is logical to think of the internet as a come and go type of thing that, as he argues, does make people be “on” more than they really need to.

Other evidence Rushkoff provides can be seen as a bit more factual. For example, when he talks about Choice, he talks about a digital CD and a record. He says that the “analog recording is a physical impression, while the digital recoding is a series of choices”. For any music junkies, this evidence can make perfect sense. The record’s quality is in a sense authentic while the CD is represented in numbers, making choices about “when those seconds are changing from one to the next”.  In other words, the record just is while the CD makes choices, much how most digital technologies make choices for us by limiting what we can choose. I think this supports his argument and when applied to the choices we make on our daily internet usage it rings even more true. Most of the time we are are given a choice of black or white, yes or no, right or wrong. But the real world doesn't work that way.

One of his arguments and the evidence for it do not really make a whole lot of sense. He sort of sums up the whole book in his last command when he says that people should learn how to program the programs in order to take control of the technologies’ biases whether they are for or against something. Rushkoff says that by becoming programmers, “we can shape the world any way we see fit”. This is not the most logical argument. There are plenty of non-programmer people that use technologies in a way that do not fall victim to the biases he speaks of. You can use digital technologies for a purpose without having to know all the codes. I think what we are doing in class with our blogs is a good example of this. I don’t think there are many people in our class that can call themselves programmers, yet we have all managed to create something. And although there are many templates and codes that were used to create the look of our blogs, the content is from our minds—purely our choice—and not that of a computer.

I wouldn’t say all of Rushkoff’s arguments are valid, but they are persuasive. He touches on a lot of what I would call real world examples to get his readers to understand his arguments. Sometimes they work, and sometimes they don’t. However, what bothers me about some of his arguments are the presumptions they make about where technology and people are going. He seems to say that unless we control the programs, we are doomed to be programmed by all the digital technologies around us. We will hardly interact in real life, we will never be able to read a book in its entirety, and so on. While I do agree that technology causes a lot of problems, I don’t think we need to control if and know how to make it in order to use it properly. I think we just have to remember one of the commands that Rushkoff has—that we all have the choice to choose nothing. We are all capable of making the right choices when it comes to using digital technologies.