This week’s readings were interesting, to say the least. Douglas Rushkoff had some very good points when writing Program or Be Programmed: everyone must make choices all day every day, we are never completely right in our statements and opinions, and in today’s society, we either need to learn how to create the technology or we fall behind. While he is correct in these simple statements, I disagree in his explanations. Rushkoff is completely wrong for one simple reason: he misrepresents humanity to the point where his writing is ridiculous and offensive.

“Likewise, through our series of choices about the news we read, feeds to which we subscribe, and websites we visit, we create a choice filter around ourselves. Friends and feeds we may have chosen arbitrarily or because we were forced to in the past soon become the markers through which our programs and search engines choose what to show us next. Our choices narrow our world, as the infinity of possibility is lost in the translation to binary code” (53-54). “Thanks to its first three biases, digital technology encourages us to make decisions, make them in a hurry, and make them about things we’ve never seen for ourselves up close” (56). Rushkoff assumes that everyone is the same. He assumes that everyone automatically fills out all of their information in social networking sites, that everyone uses search engines and sites like Wikipedia to find facts to satisfy their momentary information cravings, and that everyone accepts the facts and information they read without doing any research. This is just not true. Most of the people I know do not fill out all of the information on Facebook, and some of the people I know choose not to participate in social networking sites. While sometimes it’s convenient to look up one fact at a time, it does not satisfy humanity’s curiosity and need to know more. Research, while a term that most people despise, is something that everyone does every day. People look up information, background, and related items all the time, either for personal though, for business reasons, or for artillery to store for discussions with friends later.

“In a digital culture that values data points over context, everyone comes to believe they have the real answer and that the other side is crazy or evil” (59). The problem with this quote is that it’s just not true for anyone that isn’t an extremist; Rushkoff has the same problem that media has in that he is only looking at data for the extremist and not for the normal person. Again, he is also assuming that no one ever does any research.

“Elected officials are ridiculed as “wonks” for sharing or even understanding multiple viewpoints, the history of an issue, or its greater context” (60). And yet another offensive quote from his writing, he is likening humanity to gullible idiots that can’t understand more than one idea at a time.

Reading these chapters, I couldn’t help but get the impression that Rushkoff is a paranoid antisocial that thinks he’s more intelligent than everyone else and that technology is going to take over the world. “Is this something else we will have to pay for and learn to use? Do we even have a choice?” (62). These questions would only be asked by someone that doesn’t fully understand today’s technology. Almost everyone I know gets excited when a new technology comes out, and even if they aren’t, have little to no trouble learning how to use it. Rushkoff’s problem seems to be that he’s surrounded by idiots that sit on the computer all day looking up useless or insignificant facts that don’t contribute anything to society and by an older generation that can’t understand new technology. Maybe if he went out into the world and get to know a few more people, his thoughts on humanity and today’s technology would be different.