RINGBACK RINGBACK RINGBACK It's to the best of our knowledge from p r x. Imagine this RINGBACK a young couple adopt a baby girl from China they want to have a companion so they add a little boy to the family His name is yang and yang is a robot and one day he breaks down and the family is traumatized I often say that I'm as stupid as my characters as I feel for young 2 I think is a very sweet boy by man strange chance and this is fiction by Alexander Weinstein explores our ever growing dependence on new technologies in his debut short story collection children of the new world also filmmaker Astra Taylor says it's time to reclaim the enter net from corporate power before it's too late and Doug Rushkoff tells us how technology changes the way we think about time 1st this. B.b.c. News with Sue Montgomery president has condemned North Korea for its latest nuclear test saying Pyongyang's actions continued to be very hostile and dangerous to the United States the North said it successfully detonated a hydrogen bomb and claimed the device could be loaded on to a missile President Trump will meet his national security team later to assess the situation the director general of the UN's nuclear watchdog the i.a.e.a. Yukiya Amano condemned the test the days you get out test by the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is an extremely rare at the ball act this new test which follows on the 2 tests last year and in the 6 since 2006. Using complete disregard of the repeated demands of the international community China has urged North Korea to halt its nuclear program Sunday's test caused a 6.3 magnitude earthquake the Chinese authorities said they would begin emergency radiation monitoring in the border area Stephen McDonell reports from Beijing North Korea's latest nuclear test was felt inside China in the form of a trauma social media users posted footage with rooms shaking now officials are trying to measure if Chinese territory has been contaminated the environment ministry here has announced it will start emergency radiation monitoring along the border with North Korea this response has been set at level 2 China's 2nd highest grade for such a process reports for me and my suggests that more range of Muslim villages have been burned down as people continue to pour across the border to Bangladesh to escape days of violence fresh plumes of smoke could be seen rising from the area and west in Myanmar where the Army says it's launched a campaign against range of militants the un refugee agency says more than $70000.00 people have now fled to Bangladesh. One of Cambodia's last independent newspapers the Cambodia Daily has announced that it will close after the government ordered it to pay a huge tax bill the news comes shortly after the arrest of convert is Opposition Leader Kim saga whose party was expected to do well in next year's elections Steve Jackson reports the come Bodi a daily has been operating for a quarter of a century and has been a key outlet for criticism of the authorities the paper has been hit by a big tax bill of more than $6000000.00 which it says was imposed deliberately by the government to put it out of business with elections due next year opponents of the veteran Cambodian leader one sen see this is part of a concerted attempt to stifle dissent the party of the opposition leader Kemp says his detention was also politically motivated the government has accused him of treason and conspiring to harm the country while news from the b.b.c. . The u.s. Led coalition has confirmed reports from Syria that a convoy of buses carrying Islamic state fighters and their families are split into that part of it remains trapped in the desert under a deal struck with the Lebanese Hezbollah movement on the Syrian government the fighters gave up an enclave in western Syria in return for safe passage to Ayers held territory in the east of the country. That he feel you negotiate here in Brecht's it talks Michel Barnier has said he wants to teach the British people about the serious consequences of leaving the e.u. While insisting that he did not want to punish Britain but the British government minister leading the Brits at negotiating team David Davis accused the e.u. Of trying to put pressure on the u.k. By demanding a high divorce payment and said he wouldn't allow that to happen they've set this up to try and create pressure on us our money that's what it's about the trying to play time against money we are basically going through this very systematically very British Why a very pragmatic way of doing it and of course it's funny the devil and he wants to put pressure on us which is why the stance is this way can they in the press over bluntly I think it looked a bit silly Michel Barnier has insisted that he doesn't want to punish or blackmail Britain but wants to teach British people and others what leaving the e.u. Means. The Indian prime minister Narendra Modi has appointed a female defense minister as part of a cabinet reshuffle near my last Sitaram and becomes the 1st woman to hold the portfolio since indirect Gandhi was in charge of the department when she was prime minister 35 years ago. The u.s. Astronaut Peggy Whitson has returned to Earth after a record breaking standard stay aboard the International Space Station while there she became America's most experienced astronaut she's accumulated a total of more than $660.00 days in space during a career that has spanned 3 trips into orbit b.b.c. News. It's to the best of my knowledge I'm an strange Champ's how attached are you to your personal technology. My laptop crashed and took a lot of my work with it writer Alexander Weinstein. I found myself crying over my laptop and I noticed then just the bizarreness of crying over electronics and this was about 8 years ago. A lot of students at that point of my students were getting i Phones and they were all talking about our love my i Phone right in the kept using this word love. And that made me aware that we were starting to forge these emotional connections with our technology. Actually when you think about it this seems kind of normal I mean there are days when I look at my phone more than I look at my family it's kind of like my silicon best friend isn't that why we call it personal technology. All this hour just how deep do those attachments go we'll talk with filmmaker Astra Taylor and media theorist Doug Rushkoff But 1st Alexander Weinstein author of Children of the new world a debut collection of short stories about the dangers of our increasing reliance on digital technologies Doug Gordon sat down with him to find out more things have gotten more and more strange with Snap Chat and tender and Grinder and all the different request we have to join this or that social network Yeah so let's talk about that very poignant very powerful story saying goodbye to Yang can you tell me a bit about the story yes so you hear we have a world that's pretty close to our own and the only real differences are that people are buying robotic big brothers and sisters as babysitters for their children these can be. Any nationality and sort of any any background you want and there's a little bit of tension between them and the cloning folks right there are people that are cloning them themselves and cloning children so there's a little bit of a kind of Whole Foods organic movement going on with the non cloners right that's a sort of non g.m.o. But they are erroneous Lee I think leaning on technology as the place where they're going to find a way to to stay human and so they have this big brother who takes care of their adopted child and his name is yang and at the opening of the story he breaks down he malfunctions and so the drama of the story deals with trying to see if they can't reboot him or get him fixed and realizing how much they've started to see him this family has seen him as actually their son or as a child in their house. When we adopted Mika 3 years ago it seemed like the progressive thing that. We considered it our one small strike against cloning. And I are both white middle class and it lived an easy and privileged life. It was Kyra who suggested she be Chinese the earth quake had left thousands of orphans in its wake. It was hard not to agree. My main concern were the cultural differences the most I knew about China came from the photos and learn Chinese translations on the placemats a golden dragon the adoption agency suggested purchasing Yang he's a big brother babysitter and storehouse of cultural knowledge all in one the woman explained. She handed us a colorful pamphlet China that announced in red dragon shaped letters and said we should consider we considered Kairos putting in 40 hours a week at Crate and Barrel and I was still managing double shifts at Whole Foods it was true we're going to need someone to take. Care of me and there was no way we're going to use some clone from the neighborhood. Kyra and I were egocentric enough to consider ourselves worth replicating nor did we want our neighbors perfect kids making our daughter feel insecure. In addition yanking what a breath of cultural knowledge the tyrant I could never match he was programmed with grades k. Through college and had an in-depth understanding of national Chinese holidays like flag raising ceremony and Ghost festival. He knew about moon cakes and Sky lanterns for $200.00 more we could upgrade to a model that would teach me get tight she and acupressure when she got older and I thought about it. I could learn Mandarin I said as we lay in bed that night come on Carver said there's no way that's happening so I squeezed her hand and said. Ok it will be 2 kids that. That was great and that's one of the most powerful things about this story is that as you're reading it you kind of forget that yeah this is a robotic that he's not a real a real child and so as the story of progress is it's very poignant and almost almost makes you cry yeah yeah it's very heartbreaking I mean I I often say that I'm as duped as my character because I feel for young to I think he's a very sweet boy yeah and I do think Yang has a secret soul in there but I don't know that that's true right I think I think it's just technology Yeah exactly it is just technology and it's the human instinct to anthropomorphize animals and objects and things like that with all the advances in robotics and Ai artificial intelligence this story doesn't seem very far out of the realm of possibility and that's that's one of the intriguing things about all 13 of these stories in your collection it seems like you're performing this very tricky balancing act if you make your predictions too specific they can become obsolete very quickly but if you make your predictions too abstract they don't have the same impact because you're losing the power of the specific How do you handle that yeah it's funny you know early on so I have stories that became totally dated that are in this collection right one is early on when I was working with sort of apocalyptic visions I had a story I believe was called how your mother and I met or how your father and I met and it had to do with this couple meeting online and exchanging you know links to music and links to videos and how superficial would that be and meanwhile let's just like how we live now really so so that became just a realist story that really wasn't much of a critique at all and that's always the case with a lot of these I mean I wrote these stories so they should be warnings let us not go down this path as save our own humanity somehow from becoming addicted to technology. But a lot of the things are coming true right apparently they're working on Ai screens and contact lenses right now and all of these. Is that for me where dystopian are happening so really a lot of these stories become prophetic in that way which is very discouraging to me rather than rather than being you know oh great I got it and I think mostly what I was playing with and what inspired a lot of the plots of these stories is looking at what we're doing presently and then just moving in a step more absurd going to the logical extension of what would be next and what would we find mildly horrifying right now but once we got used to it we would totally accept it because that's pretty much how we are with technology Yeah very much so and you mention that you do see these stories as warning so that you do you do see them as cautionary tales Oh yeah definitely I mean I see it is that you know I think the hopefulness comes in the human interactions again and again the way that the parents do love Yang and I think when Yang breaks down the narrator begins to realize the humanity of his family that he's missed and of his neighbors that he's judged and of all the people the light going on around him you know the cautionary tale is really about how much are we disappearing into our technology right now how addicted are we getting to that and how much do we have the ability to step away from that and return to community building and things like that another theme that recurs throughout these stories is the exploitation of spirituality for profit for example the story Moshe what does the word mean while liberation so much a state of liberation where you transcend all I suppose earthly attachments to the ego to material world and are able to liberate oneself really from from this this world of of desire tell me a bit about without of course giving away too many if any spoilers what happens in the story Moshe Well right and so this is a Buddhist term and the premise is that in this world the u.s. Government has cracked down on enlightenment. Particularly because there's started to be these virtual in like meant drugs that can get you to different states of Buddhist or Soofi liberation and some cases and so you have drugs we find out later like trance which is the soupy one where you just want to spin and spin or that lets you transcend your ego completely and see the world as pure light and the u.s. Government crackdown in this kind of these sort of meth lab equivalents as where people are cannibalizing old Genesis and then Tendo systems and creating these almost 10 foil caps that you can wear and there's these underground yoga studios where you can go and get these jolts of electronic and light and but they it's very sketchy and you can end up in jail and there's all sorts of oxygen bar folks ending up in jail and what have you yeah so our main character goes to Nepal where it said you can still get the real stuff right you can really get a pair and if you go there you save up your money got to ask but you'll find and so that that's the premise of it of this young kid named a he's probably around I think 20 or so and he's he's looking for enlightenment over in the palm so now would be the ideal time to have you read an excerpt great so this is where ape has finally found enlightenment he's found the place in the palm it's set up as a blow dryer but he's about to put on this have. 8 hesitated. Until now he to match and never find him like and. Faced with the beauty salon chair he wasn't sure he was ready what if like Sandra's father he became one of those modern day sobbing who ate only raw food and talked about complete shock. He asked if he needed to do anything to prepare meditate breathe properly. You know just said we take care of Moshe. Maybe not it and lowered himself into the chair the kid dropped the blow dryer cap on tapes had logged on to the laptop. By the side of the chair and hit enter. The jolt of moksha was immediate one moment Abe was sitting in the chair watching the men chicken curry and wondering what to lighten it would feel like and the next 2nd their bodies transformed into bands of light. Weight had seen a dark cluttered space it became apparent that the configuration of computer boxes the pile of plastic water bottles and the mess of this and belt laptops form the sacred geometry whose mom spread outward past the walls. It could see through the bricks to perceive the entire city. Home every shop shone brightly with its display of a 100 bronze Buddhas. In the taxis that cut their way through the crowds sent a chorus of honks into the air like birdsong. You saw the kids playing in the bricks the white kid who had hugged him standing on the corner haggling for a yak blanket the words leaving the kids mouth as a loony to air currents and he saw the light of their hearts beating beneath their skin while above and around inside them was a force so bright that to look at it directly was blinding. He told himself to look away but he was too late his limited ego that tried to hang on was a minuscule value in comparison to the illumination of the infinite. A turned his Next customer waiting. I think that if there's one sentence that really sums up the major theme of your collection it's one that comes from the title story children of the New World the sentences in this world we seemed to understand we were free to experience a physical connection that we've always longed for in the real world but had never been able to achieve. What do you think is an interesting yeah I mean that's the lure of the Internet in some ways that's the sweet part I guess you could say of what the Internet allows us right the beneficial sides is that we long for connection yeah we long not to be lonely we long to know that we're not crazy or that there are other people like us out there or that we're loved and these kind of very human emotions and the Internet promises promised promises still promises that we will we will connect with other people and it does obviously it does right people fall in love on law and they meet long lost friends and they come together and I often think of somebody who is gay or bi in a small town and they don't know that anybody around them they're surrounded by people that telling them they're wrong and they can reach out to big cities and find out that they're not wrong right and that they have a community out there these are examples of really great connection the difficulty becomes that there's a way that we're also thwarted online and so I mentioned online dating for example where somebody can fall in love but on the flip side it also teaches you to Lex white people into the trash that you don't like and so there's this great loneliness or this great kind of cold hearted in this that it can create wherein I think we start to see people as commodities there's also this hope to become a You Tube sensation and so there's a survival of the fittest capitalism that has snuck in to all our online interactions so that if I write you know something about my going to Paris in an email suddenly I'll see in my banner trips to Paris and that becomes very sketchy and very more of this feeling of constantly being used and I think a sort of materialist philosophy and intruding into our online interactions that can cause much more loneliness than the internet average only promised us. Alexander Weinstein is the author of the debut short story collection children of the New World the garden talked with them and let's hear Weinstein read one more bit this time from the title story in which spam and malware take the form of humans terrorizing a young couple and their home. The Frequently Asked Questions didn't cover this it was only after searching through other users blog entries that we figured out how to delete him from our home. But during our next session when the doorbell rang we opened the front door and encountered a man from Guyana who told us he was a distant relative. He brought our children presents he said he needed our credit number to upload the toys for the kids. We locked the door but we could see the man outside pacing 1st on our porch and then climbing into our bushes to knock on our windows with a lead of the African man but when night came our lamps no longer litter home with soft warm it contained a shadowy light and our house was filled with the feeling of being watched by countless eyes our every action scan for information. I logged off to call on line support. The man on the other end of the line spoke broken English the line buzzing from an overseas connection to try to couple options with me and finally said Sir your account is corrupted you have to reset all files to the initial set of. What's happening. You must delete all data from your account your preferences photos and use it you need to recreate your bodies again I see you have children yes you will need to delete them what the virus has spread to them you'll have to delete them and begin again I'm sorry sir. I'm not the leaving my children. Yes Or I understand it's your choice but the system has a fatal error it'll only get worse your county is filled with viruses you will not want your children in that house to. Put your supervisor on yes or. No it's been on hold for 10 minutes of light. Until a supervisor and later her supervisor told me the same information that we should have installed an antivirus protection plan without it there was little left to do but return our system to factory settings What if we moved to a new house I'm afraid all your family's corrupted the supervisor told me you'll just end up bringing the virus with you it's an easy process to reboot simply hold down the power button on your console for 20 seconds and these are my children are you know. It's any consolation they won't feel a thing. Just data. Alexander Weinstein from his short story collection children of the New World. Coming up filmmaker Esther Taylor tells us why we need to take back the Ethernet and check the poster man says social media ruins everything including death. An answer and chance it's to the best of our knowledge from Wisconsin Public Radio n.p.r. X. . Now choose a tagline that will attract the woman you want secret do what no one else is doing I'm 8 feet tall and I have one giant. This week on selected shorts Big Love from p.r.i. Public Radio International. Today at 5 pm. The next thing I remember is standing in the rude next to a man holding a rifle. I didn't know what time it was because it was dark outside it is the early hours of the morning in the dark I could see another armed person guarding my bedroom door join us for stories of living under the gun that's next time on the mof Radio Hour from p.r.s. . That's at 6 o'clock. The Internet changes everything concluding. Just ask Chuck Klosterman. I think the Internet did it I think the Internet changed my perception of death. I was going to the new Richard Linklater movie everybody wants some and I'll look in my phone and princes died and I was a big Prince fan and you know for lots of reasons musical but also because I'm from North Dakota and he was from Minneapolis there was this weird connection sort of I guess being in Wisconsin same thing but also it's like a certain kind of like northern Midwest like I feel like our Midwest is very different than what most of America thinks of the Midwest as Iowa and Kansas and stuff and this feels different you know more isolated so I was like boy this is a real or a bomb or whatever so I turned off my phone and I watched the movie and I watched the whole thing kind of vaguely thinking about Prince not directly I mean I followed the plot but it was always sort of there that I would go to the movie and I turn my phone back on and I started looking at social media and suddenly it feels like I didn't care about friends at all like like these people are acting as though that their whole life is shutting down like I was able to go to a movie you know I got popcorn design I was like oh this is a year like am I an unfeeling person. Or. Is something going on with death now that isn't like these people talking about you know remembering hearing Purple Rain at like the 8th grade dance or whatever like they're only kind of talking about Prince it was almost as though they who are friends to die they didn't realize this but they were working for friends to die so they could connect themselves and their life to this thing other people sort of had a connection with. And that's not terrible I mean like I feel a kind of a jerk saying like oh how dare these people be upset by it I think on balance maybe it's good but something can be good and still be weird. Commentary from Chuck close to mine his latest book is called 10. There's a reason we just can't get enough of the Internet in a new book The People's Platform filmmaker Astra are argues that our digital life. Because we've handed our political and economic power over to giant tech corporations who are making money off every post and tweet we make I think we need to talk about the way that these devices and these platforms in these websites are actually addictive by design every aspect of a website like Facebook has tested to see what gets us to engage the most so everything from the color schemes to where buttons are placed and they need to maximize our engagement to maximize their clicks because they get data from that and that's actually the business model of these sites their advertising financed and so they need us to engage in to give more information and to like as many things as possible because that's where the profit comes from so I think it's important to shift that to go this isn't just about us being unable to control our impulses it's more like the way sugary cereals are stocked on the bottom row at the grocery store so that you know kids go crazy and can't help but ask their parents for them well this sounds like media criticism want to what in the sense that remember the the discussions of subliminal advertising back in the sixty's and seventy's yeah you know there is there is something surprisingly retrograde I've been saying that we've almost arrived in a retrograde future because there was this idea that the Internet would break us out of all of these old systems and out of the old media model you know out of the old broadcasting model where a small number of people got to tell us what to watch because they program the television or the radio but that's why I find it so interesting. Yet for all this technological innovation we're still actually completely advertiser dependent I mean with the exception of Wikipedia we do not spend any time and on commercial spaces on the Web You know there's no significant on commercial web site online so we're in this strange moment where you see a resurgence of things like need of advertising which is essentially brand sponsored content or news you know this conjures up the old days of soap operas with its old soap or the camel new therapy and it was the cigarette sponsor new show so again the retrograde future we've kind of come forward technologically but economically we're still in the in the old days well that kind of sheds new light on why everybody likes Mad Men so much Yeah I think is it still relevant that's still in many ways the system that we're we're in and you know the advertising industry is has not been disrupted to use the kind of Silicon Valley target at all there's more and more money going into that arena and more of it's flowing online in ways that I think are pretty troubling if you care about democracy and that really is media criticism one on one and I think there was this idea that the Internet almost made that kind of media criticism irrelevant because again we would all be able to choose and be in charge of ourselves in this digital sphere and I think what we we need to actually think about how that school that applies in a digital age I guess in some ways maybe we sort of feel like the ads are just the price we have to pay for getting this huge thing called the Internet I mean for example you know I like Facebook a lot better before all the ads but you know mostly I see them as an annoyance and I scrolled the Hastert and I just don't look at them and I do get to connect with my friends for free maybe the ads are just the price I have to pay. Right and I think there needs to be a more critical interrogation of the idea that we get these services for free because you know advertising isn't free we're paying with our data which is what these marketers then collect then analyze and use to reach us with their their targeted pitches and I think they're actually social costs that go far beyond just the kind of annoying it's element of you know sort of these things and in the side of my browser that I don't want to look at in those elements are really important because the way that advertising used to work it was much more straightforward right something would come on the t.v. Or the radio that interrupted the regularly scheduled programming and you could turn it off but what happens is you can never turn off these systems of tracking online I mean and this leads not just to again the annoying ads but to things like price discrimination because what one person sees on the web isn't what another person sees online so I might get an ad that says you know ask your tailor enroll at this fancy college next year but somebody else might get around this is hey in role of this predatory for profit college you know there's real concerns about redlining about people being offered different interest rates or different prices on goods that will kind of reinforce the old social inequities So again it's not as simple as just seeing ads there's also this question like well what kind of culture do advertisers want to support because you might say Ok it seems like a fair tradeoff Now I like to face the better before but the question is what direction is it heading in and so we're seeing signs of that with things like the pay to promote you know it's getting harder and harder for groups to reach their their bases the people that they've managed to connect with you know a community group might have 10000 likes or something like that but now it's only reaching a fraction of them when it's in that I message and on the other hand it's interesting that a lot of us regard the Internet and digital technology as this great democratizing force you know that gives everybody a platform to be heard. Regardless of status when you think about the Arab Spring that was something that really motivated me to take a more critical look because I've got various sort of sidelines I'm a documentary filmmaker I work as a journalist but I also do a lot of organizing and activism and so this issue of democracy really matters to me and people having of ways and I was concerned about the fact that we are handing over so much power to these corporate platforms because the Internet again because there are very few noncommercial spaces online we confuse ourselves when we talk about it as a sort of public square you know when I go out and I protest in the streets I have certain rights rights that cannot be impinged upon by the government I have the right to assembly and free speech and simply that when you go on to these social media sites you are agreeing to a Terms of Service and you're handing away a lot of those rights so those are kind of our Gora's in the in the digital age you know there are there are real concerns in terms of maintaining our freedom to protest and and our freedom to challenge people in power sure but can't you do the same thing online you can create a blog and put it up there make a video and put it on You Tube yeah the thing is that you can but the those sites ultimately can take anything you put up there down and there have been some examples of Middle East protesters putting up pictures of the documented violence onto a site like Flicker wanting to spread the word say this is happening to us and then flicker took all of the photos down and said Well you know we don't allow pictures of violence on our site and they're saying well these are political photographs documenting something really important so it's just that that sense that these spaces are not safe we can't count on them in the same way because again they're private I mean I can't go and lead a protest in a shopping mall right because that's not public space that's private property in these platforms or more like private property they're more like shopping malls and they are like the things we like to compare them to we like this. Google's a library or we like to say Twitter's a town square but there are major differences there I feel like our analogies kind of confuse us I feel like the question to me in a philosophical level is like well what would a real public square look like in the digital world like we don't we don't have any real examples of that and I think it would be kind of neat to get together and trying to make those and it's really interesting hearing you say that because you know these same critiques are made of commercial television back in the dark ages and it's kind of funny to think it was only what a few decades ago that n.p.r. Was created are you saying we need a public digital sphere and then with that you look like. Right I think we do need that it's really interesting to go back to the history books and read about the evolution of public or noncommercial media in the United States and we were pretty late on the bandwagon and then like public broadcasting only emerged in the sixty's but people were sounding the alarm about it and trying to build alternatives going way back to the early days and so I feel like we could hypothetically be heading towards that kind of tipping point in the digital space where you just go I'm tired of all my news being actually like branded content so you're really talking about maybe we're heading toward a new era of regulation on the Internet and I simply applying some of those same kinds of regulations the f.c.c. Applied to radio and television stations maybe need to be kind of re adapted for the digital age so that's kind of at this larger political level. What about other things that individual users could do yeah there's you know we have to not be as susceptible to convenience as the ultimate virtue and it's very hard as an Internet user. I think that if we could resist convenience the temptation of convenience and and do things that are a bit more difficult in the digital space that could have a big impact so what do I mean I mean things as simple as not always buying everything from Amazon right you can buy. Books from your local bookstore even if you're not physically near them by going to that stores website since writing my book I've started to to use non Google email services there are things like Rise of the net which is a nonprofit privacy respecting e-mail service or Fast Mail where you pay you know a small sum in the scheme of things for e-mail but in return you're not paying with your personal data and you're not being subjected to advertising so I think there are a lot of a little things that we can do but in the book I try to balance these individual options with an awareness that we do need to think about bigger collective political fixes and that we shouldn't be so afraid of the word regulation I mean you know doing nothing means that we are basically giving more and more power to the marketing and advertising marketing industry and to this handful of big corporate players. Astra Taylor is a filmmaker and author of The People's Platform taking back power and culture in the digital age. There's a scenario that used to be a staple in comedy or humor the whole family on the couch each person absorbed in a different mobile device they used to be a joke that was just real for 3 decades mit. Professor Sherry Turkle has been studying the ways we interact with machines through her books the 2nd self and life on the screen and in her most recent book Alone Together she explores the toll digital technology is taking on our personal relationships we are living a life mix of what's in the physical and what's in the virtual and I think that's genuinely new and that can only come if you have a device with you that lets you you know literally be at dinner with your friends looking and looking down in a moment at your Blackberry and doing something in your virtual world doing something on Facebook that your life is a mixture of what you do in the real and the virtual. I was at a funeral people at a funeral party or are hiding their Blackberries under the funeral program they're texting and it didn't just happen once it happened several times and many people have spoken to me about similar experiences they've had it's about not taking a moment at the times that we need to be most present to each other it's not just about letting our attention wander it's about forgetting the point of the exercise which is to be with each other at the times that count. To take a time it's less dark a speaking to someone who is talking about a 15 year old birthday party and there's a point at this party when everybody wants to go home and part of being 15 and successfully getting to be 16 is that 15 year olds have to fight through that moment and learn to get along with each other and to make it work with each other but at this 15 year old birthday party everybody could just you know get on their Facebook and be elsewhere and not have to deal with each other. And this option to not just ignore each other but to really find an active social place in the world that doesn't include each other I think that is genuinely new. Really need to think about when we need to deliberate when we need to just be with each other I think the question is not turning off our technology and not giving away these wonderful technology but it needs to be put in its place and sometimes you really 'd just need to be with each other and give each other our full attention and that's the sense that I fear that we're losing and we need to refocus on. MIT's social scientist Sherry Turkle she is the author of Alone Together 'd Why We Expect More From Technology and Less from Each Other. Coming up media there is Doug Rushkoff says technology is changing the way we think about time a man's trench apps is to the best of our knowledge from Wisconsin Public Radio and p r x. Better today on This American. Secretary of Education it's a device volunteered as a mentor at a public school for years and there she was in her $1000.00 suit. Really pretty soon. And I just thought how she looked she just looked so out of place with those years of volunteer tell us about Betsy De Vos they are today. Today at one. Am Harry Shearer host of the show a weekly through the worlds of media politics and the Liberty apology along with an eclectic mix of mysterious music and the berry you can hear live show only on k l w every Sunday at noon. I don't know about you but I feel like I can never ever no matter what I do keep up with the endless torrent of e-mail and Facebook not to mention Twitter Instagram Snap Chat and all the rest when media theorist Doug Rushkoff says all this technology is actually changing our relationship to time and we're all having trouble adapting to it he talked with Steve Paulson. Doug the title of your book Present Shock is a reference to Alvin Toffler 1970 book Future Shock What's the difference between Future Shock and Present Shock Well I guess in some sense I may be that the sensation might be similar the real difference is that the future that Alvin Toffler was describing that we were moving towards is here with us now so while Topher was really warning us really to learn how to orient to a world that was changing ever more rapidly to basically be able to adjust to change itself I'm arguing that that changes happen that if anything new as we passed from the ninety's into the 21st century we became less of a society that was just obsessed with the future and what's next and what's happening what's the next big thing where is it all going and we became a society that was very much in the moment in kind of an always on real time hyper connected moment so our our focus really becomes less about how do we adjust to change to something much more like how do we adjust to living in a world where everything is happening seemingly at the same time where you break this idea of present his and down into 5 big areas and let's talk about those a one you call did you Freeney What is this. We're different is interesting and it kind of comes out of that video game sensibility I mean the beauty of video games is that instead of watching some other character go through a story you're the one going through the story you know you're the one making the choices in real time and you move from choice to choice to choice to choice rather than watching these canned choices is the sense of agency but you know the digital environment very often makes it seem like you don't even have to choose you don't have to choose between this and that you can choose both and we're doing so many things online where we're choosing both that we've ended up with really multiple instances multiple incarnations of ourself kind of running simultaneously on all these different platforms and it's very hard to live with more than one you you know digital technology is great for copying things but human beings don't copy so well so there's you on Twitter that maybe somebody is commenting on something that you did there's you in your inbox it's filling up with messages that are waiting for responses there's you on Facebook who might be being used to advertise a product you never even heard of while you're asleep you know when you wake up that you've been in these sponsored stories you know so how do you deal with all of these different use running simultaneously that's sort of the essence of this digit Frannie or this kind of digital confusion so you're in basically you're saying that it's enough to make you a little crazy there's almost like a split personality here because we're tending to so many different digital persona I write and even if your personality is not split your digital personalities are split and your single person now it's going to have to deal with all of them I got the idea for the digit Freni a chapter when I was in the lobby of a hotel in Berlin I kept trying to lock into my Google calendar to see if I can do it one talk at the same time is another talk with or I'd be able to get from one to the other in time and each place I went to. I couldn't log until I finally got wife I and I'm in this lobby and I get this message back from Google that they locked me out of my calendar because they said I was trying to log in from too many places at once so Google Calendar didn't believe I was a human being they didn't believe one human could be in all those places at once and that to me seemed to be the essence of you know the problem we have a digital culture it's not this idea of information overload and all these people have all these problems with digital technology and this I promise you present shock is not one of these books is just whining and hand-wringing about the problems of digitalis But what I do get concerned about is our readiness to really to put our human lives into digital time frames of digital technologies really don't understand time they live outside time they're just sequences you know your Twitter feed is not in real time it's just trying to catch up with you just because people are sending emails out to you it doesn't mean that you have to respond in real time to them right the beauty of digital technology was that it waited you know the early conversations we used to have on the bulletin boards we were all so smart because we had all the time in the world to respond to these things we sounded smarter online than we did in real life right well in the irony of course is that this was supposed to make our life better as opposed to make it easier and it's him flexes his feel crazier right and that's because and I mean and not to get leftist on you or anything but I really do believe it's because instead of using digital technology and I for slack which is what we saw it as right we're all going to be able to work from home in our underwear any time we want you know because we'll just get our work done and turn it in as it's as it's ready rather than go into work for this 8 hours a day and being always on while you're there what we ended up doing instead was kind of taking the time is money offish and see values of the industrial age. And translating them into the digital age where digital technology really if we're going to embrace it the way I think we can it's about really liberating ourselves from these obsolete Industrial Age priorities and embracing a totally different Really way of working and a much more peer to peer fashion where we create value and sell it directly to one another rather than going in and having these these now sort of 9 to 5 jobs that are really just a relic of the 1st factories of the 1300s now another aspect of this present isn't that we've been talking about is what you call overwinding What do you mean by overwinding Yeah when I got the idea for overwinding when I was reading Stuart brand's great book The clock of the Long Now in order to write this one what he argues in there is that we need to think in these great sort of 10000 year time spans and this is sort of following up on an actual clock that is being built that will last 10000 years right I'll be interested to see if they actually finish the actual clock I guess there's enough money that went into it you know to me it was just as valuable as a as a thought experiment really what would it be like to build this thing what would it mean the most important thing is that now people he wants us to think in these 10000 years spent rather than just you know next year even next century what is the impact of this over 10000 years and I was trying to do that you know and I had this plastic water bottle I was about to get on a plane I didn't see a recycle bin that was just a trash can there and I don't I just do it out you know it's it can be 10000 years and I realize it wasn't feeling like a like a long now to me it was feeling more like a short forever and that's where I got the idea of overwinding where where in a present just society and always on sort of micro moment managed society it's very tempting to try to compress these really long time scales into really short periods of time so you'll see examples of that say you know on the stock market where people don't. In order to invest in the future of a company they buy in order to make money on the trade right so people buy Facebook in the morning and they're mad 5 minutes later that it hasn't gone up and they go sell it and people who aren't satisfied with that you know they end up buying derivatives on stocks which are really just a way to buy the future stock now or you buy a derivative on the derivative So are there solutions here I mean one of the things that you talk about is what you call spring loading What's that well spring loading would be a positive way of looking at winding saying Ok we can do time compression but let's do it consciously and willfully rather than just as a way of trying to beat the clock or let's at least apply it to areas where timing is necessary so there's a hospital you know that it's a hospital in Israel they wanted to be able to sort of have a hospital in a box that you could just pop on a soccer field somewhere and it would just kind of expand so what they do is they take a whole lot of time and they put into preparation you know Ok what if we're going to have an o.b. G.y.n. Clinic and we're going to have a disease thing or a virus control and something for refugees and starvation you know they work out the whole thing and they actually do pop into these crates and stick it on a cargo plane and they sit and wait and when the Haiti earthquake happened and when the Japanese tsunami happened Israel sent over this plane they pop this thing out on parachutes and the doctors and nurses land on a different plane and in hours they have a giant working hospital that the hospital they put in Haiti was better than any local Haiti hospital and they just dealt with such high volumes of people and that's really just the sort of a positive way of looking at time and how you can compress something and then exploded out Well it raises questions fascinating questions about what we mean by real time there was a traditional sense of real time of you know it was kind of what we would do with our physical body you know not dealing with any kind of digital technologies and yet real time. I think it's taken on an entirely different meaning now oh it has real time means the sort of always on Twitter feed all that real time and of course that's not real time that's that's 5 minutes ago 10 minutes ago 10 seconds ago it's still not you in real in real real time the Greeks actually understood this way back when even with the with the some dollar whatever they had they had 2 different words for time you know there's the typical one Kronos which means time of the clock like it's for a one and they had this other word Kairos which meant timing and timing was more about your your readiness or the appropriateness timing was what only humans could really understand it's like you know I crashed the car at for a one but what's the best time to tell dad that I crashed the car you know it's at 5 o one No it's timing you know that's after he's had his drink and before he's open the bills right it's a much more subtle and then more and more time you spend aware of timing and being ready the more you begin to connect with all of these cycles that you know you could call them new age but they're actually real I mean when you asked me how I work I work according to the moon and I became aware of Irving direct this Olympic trainer who was getting all these great results by sort of matching people's workout routines to lunar cycles and looking at different weeks at different tides and it also affects your body's chemistry differently we say how do you do this you work according to the lunar cycle yet believe it or not because what new research is showing I mean you can see it in the book or go to there's a bunch of places like so myspace dot org is a great place to look at this stuff or go to Irving to Arctic super wave site so this is edge science if you will so it's the kind of thing that you know you do a little experimentation on yourself and just see what works and what doesn't what I found out from them was that over a 28 day lunar cycle there's sort of 4 main weeks 28 days is for 7 day weeks and in each week a different neurotransmitter seems to dominate our brain chemistry the 1st week is acetylcholine the 2nd week of Saratov. Onan 3rd week is dopamine and the last week has nor been efferent So if you know that you go oh my gosh it's not just me but everybody's on the Seattle calling this week that means they're going to have good energy right they're going to be peppy it's going to be great for introducing them to new ideas Sara Tonin week everybody's going to have a lot of energy to work you know it's everybody's going to be very productive so that's when I do my writing I don't even worry about it the next week don't mean week you're not going to get anything done don't mean week that's when you're going to go skiing and party and go nuts right and the final week norepinephrine that's the fight or flight neurotransmitter So that's putting everybody in a very sort of analytic structural sort of Barack Obama mindset you know that's where to organize my calendar that's when to organize the chapters of my book so when I did that I stopped thinking of dopamine week which did turn out to come up every month as writer's block that's now what it is it something else this is the time when I'm going to enjoy people and have my parties and do my crazy stuff you know and then when I looked at it that way you know I just did it by my efficiency in terms of words my word count went up about 40 percent really yeah when I worked really according to these sort of underlying biological clocks and this stuff which we look at as folklore now you got to remember we looked at jetlag as folklore and old wives' tales until it was Major League Baseball manager started to realize their pictures did way better when they traveled from the East Coast to the west then when they traveled from the West Coast to the east and it didn't make sense until they really came to understand how biological clocks work our relationship to our melatonin in the sun and there's all of these other cycles that's what keeps people alive and in time you know when we ride roughshod over it either with the shift work trying to be always on trying to have the same responses in the 2nd week of a cycle as the 3rd or 4th that were always the same I mean you can push over it if you're a professional you can do your show every day. But if you become aware of it you can realize oh my shows this week are going to be more like this and my shows that week are going to be more like that you can really schedule you know you're sort of actually challenging ones you're giving me a whole new ideas about how to produce race x. True and then the music stars and those folks on top I mean we you know you can play a tune into all that it really does work RINGBACK RINGBACK . Doug Rushkoff is the author of present shock when everything happens now. To the best of our knowledge comes to you from Wisconsin Public Radio. Produced this hour with help from Charles Monroe Kane and Mark breakers thanks to Steve got your for engineering. Technical Director Steve Fossett as our executive producer and I man's trencher. Thanks for listening. This morning on work with Marty Nemko this school year is starting well how do you make your education career ready and while we're on beginnings how do you onboard Well stay on board and maybe get promoted Plus you can call in for a work over on work with Marty Nemko this morning at 11 that's this morning from 11 to noon here on 91.7. San Francisco. Hi I'm Harry Shearer host of the show a weekly romp through the worlds of media politics and showbusiness delivered songs apology along with an eclectic mix of mysterious music and in the Bay Area you can hear live show only on Calle w. Every Sunday at noon join me on to.