Children of Chaos> *
(Surviving the end of the world as we know it)
Harper Collins
279pp, £12.99 hbk
WHEN the cultural and social historians of tomorrow look back on today's debates in Ireland about the Internet, wheat will they find? Wide ranging, in depth discussions about how our society is changing, how new media will affect politics and private lives, how digital technologies are shaping our industries and education and views of the world?
Probably not. Instead, the historians will discover just one dominant theme: that children are the main "victims" of cyberspace. From all the phone ins and studio debates, they will deduce that:
(1) almost all our politicians, broadcasters and journalists reckon the Internet is an "incredibly important" thing;
(2) the vast majority of these same politicians and media people (well, the ones that go on Questions and Answers) are also the first to say they haven't a clue about how to use it
(3) in fact, "only children under the age of 10 have a real grasp of it";
(4) the real main issues are child pornography and (in the same breath) children's access to online porn.
(5) So, plenty of fear and loathing about cyberspace, by people who aren't even in it.
While nonsense, ignorance and moral panics about computer networks aren't exactly new, this emphasis on children is relatively recent. And insidious.
To the scare stories about hackers, neo Nazis and indiscriminate bombers using the Internet (see panel), the media have added child molesters and paedophile porn rings. This is how the new digital media are being portrayed by most of the traditional media. As a dangerous place that needs to be tamed.
"Of course, the best excuse to stay out of cyberspace and, even more important, keep your children out, is the mediasensationalised cyberporn community," argues Douglas Rushkoff, author of Children of Chaos.
Instead of seeing children as the main victims in a digital jungle, his new book reverses the equation. Subtitled Surviving the End of the World As We Know It - a reference to REM's litany song - the book's American edition has an even more explanatory subtitle: How Kids' Culture Can Teach Us to Thrive in an Age of Chaos>*. It argues that children are best adapted to build and navigate through the networks and their rapidly emerging, high speed, cut-'n'-paste culture of chaos and fragmentation.
THEY are the natives of chaos - or the "screen-agers", as Rushkoff dubs this generation of kids brought up on television and computer games.
As more and more activities "migrate" into cyberspace, he argues that the screenagers are better equipped than the baby boomers to cope with this complex, discontinuous environment. He likens them to the children of immigrants, who pick up the language and culture far more quickly than their elders.
"Like any new immigrants to an unfamiliar culture, we must look to our children for signs of how to act and think," he says. He also argues that humans have evolved significantly within a single lifespan.
"Compare the number of ideas a person is exposed to every day with the number he might have been asked to consider, say, just 75 years ago. Inventions like the telephone, television, radio, tickertape, photocopier, fax machine, modem, Internet, cable TV, videoconferencing, computer bulletin boards and the World Wide Web function to increase the number of ideas and number of people with whose thought we come in contact."
Rushkoff dissects the appeal of screenage culture, from Beavis And Butt head and Barney to body piercing, gangsta rap, goth parties, Pogs, Power Rangers reruns, Pulp Fiction, skateboards, Star Trek's evolution, and, er, that gooey stuff called Gak.
He even explores "the semiotics of slime", how Gak "is a toy based in pure play - there is no story, conflict, or metaphorical value. Gak is not like goo; it is good ... Gak initiates the process of social and sexual intimacy as it directs us toward an appreciation of life without role models, expertise, conflicts, stories or metaphor. You can't `win' at Gak. There's no end to the game...
Equally, games such as Doom prepare screenagers to embrace chaos and process information faster. "If we are about to enter an age of information glut, those who can wade through it will be people with the ability to evaluate, and discard a screen of data immediately," he says.
Some will be instantly sceptical about Rushkoff's claims, which do have a bit of a hope-I-die-before-I-get-old ring about them. They also reek of the extreme ethnocentricity of so many Americans writing about the area, where "global village" turns out to be Greenwich Village.
But Rushkoff also has a strong track record of looking at apparently marginal edges of media, technology and pop culture and capturing the emerging paradigms. His publishing company calls him "the brilliant heir to McLuhan" though Rushkoff himself rejects the spokes-guru tag. "I'm just a writer - I'm no pundit," he says. "In fact, `cyber-guru' is an oxymoron. That's the whole point of the Internet: there are no experts."
In his best selling books, rave culture collides with new media and cyberspace pioneers - and with a bit of potted chaos theory, Richard Dawkins and Douglas Coupland thrown in for good measure.
In 1994, he published not one but three books on these overlapping themes: first there was Cyberia: Life in the Trenches of Hyperspace, about some of the key players (if that's not a contradiction) in the fledgling cyber/rave communities; he also looked at the Darwinian tendencies of the US media in Media Virus!, and had time to edit The GenX Reader. Today, he says, the so called "Generation X" brigade are all mostly in their thirties anyway.
NOW in his mid thirties himself, Rushkoff is a film graduate who lives in the West Village in New York, in a tiny apartment. It probably has a very large hatstand, because he wears plenty of hats: TV producer, columnist (with the Guardian Online), lecturer, consultant, novelist and social theorist. He is a technology and culture consultant to the UN's Commission on World Culture, and to private companies such as Sony and Turner Broadcasting, though he insists that big business hasn't "co opted" him... yet.
He is also a software developer, and has written various Electronic Oracle" programs, including Cyber Tarot, "a re exploration of the ancient divination system in a computer environment". In other words, the psychedelic presence of his mentor, the late Timothy Leary, hovers over Rushkoff's writing. The high speed opinions are peppered with bits of holism, animism and consensual hallucination.
Besides those recycled New Age concepts, the book has several annoying traits: the boring rambles into both religious and pseudo scientific territories; the free association style; and the often longwinded and repetitive analysis. Rushkoff also wants to have it both ways: celebrating children's culture from the inside, but then talking to the reader as a fellow outsider. Who are the "we" referred to throughout the book? He talks about "we as adults", "unlike our kids, we ...", "we are afraid because unlike our children..."
At the same time, Rushkoff is well respected for his grasp of the media as a turbulent, chaotic system of competing viruses, and he has made a brave attempt to bring an intellectual rigour and vigour to children's culture - to their totems and games which baffle parents and pundits, and which the baby busters' media elites have no time for.
It's also refreshing to read a book which celebrates the importance of playgrounds and Playstations (its title in the US is Playing the Future), turning children into active subjects of cyberspace instead of its passive, consuming, victims.
As is increasingly the norm, you can download the opening chapter of Children of Chaos>* free from the Web (check out Rushkoff's home page at http://www.interport.net/ rushoff or http://www.levity.com/rushkoff/index.htm
And Maggie's Happy Page (http://www.mscd.edu/ usery/Cyberia. html)
is dedicated to his book Cyberia, with plenty of links to "Cyberian" sorts of people and enterprises.