Rushkoff, Douglas

Douglas Rushkoff (1961–) is an award-winning author and analyst of new media as it relates to popular culture. He is a prolific media theorist, writer, and documentarian. He teaches media studies at [Page 318]New York University and the New School in Manhattan. Rushkoff has written several books, Cyberia: Life in the Trenches of Hyperspace (1994), Media Virus (1995), Playing the Future (1996), Coercion (1999; winner of the Media Ecology Association's Marshall McLuhan Award), Get Back in the Box: Innovation From the Inside Out (2005), Life, Inc. (2009), and Program or Be Programmed (2010). He is a regular commentator for National Public Radio's All Things Considered, Talk of the Nation, and Fresh Air. He has also written and hosted three Frontline documentaries, The Merchants of Cool (2001), The Persuaders (2004), and Digital Nation (2009–10). Because of his contributions to the field of media ecology, he is often distinguished as the most influential and widely read American cyberculture and new media analyst to emerge during the 1990s.

Rushkoff has written about new media since the 1990s. He has been one of the leaders at the forefront of the movement. His constant involvement in the field allows him to witness the development, growth, and proliferation of new media and the building of a digital society. As new media progressed and matured, so did Rushkoff. In the beginning, he had a techno-utopian view of new media, one bursting with emancipatory and egalitarian potential. Over the years, Rushkoff has refined his utopian view into a nuanced critique of cyberculture discourse and the impact of media on society. His development and commitment to the study of new media have earned him an international reputation and make him one of the most influential media theorists in America.

A leader in the study of new media and winner of the first Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity, Douglas Rushkoff is an author, teacher, and documentarian.

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For his scholarship, Rushkoff has received numerous honors, including the first Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity (2004). He is one of 12 founding members of Technorealism (a continuous critical examination of how technologies could help or hinder people in the struggle to improve the quality of their lives); he serves on the board of directors of both the Media Ecology Association and the Center for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics; and he is a member of the advisory board for both the National Association for Media Literacy Education and Hyper Words.

Rushkoff's research focuses on the ways that people, cultures, and institutions create, share, and influence one another's values. How the elements of media, culture, and people intersect determines the influence of new media on the intersections. Additionally, Rushkoff helps individuals to question and analyze their media consumption and highlights the need to regain control; he sees children as an especially vulnerable population.

For Rushkoff, the Internet and new media have created a potentially limitless world, one that could be free from the constraints of appearance and prejudice, time and space, and gender and power. Given this, the Internet has been described as promoting a do-it-yourself (DIY) type of mentality, a space that provides the individual with the opportunity to design her or his world on her or his own terms. For critical scholars such as Rushkoff, the Internet represents a decentralized reality that they believe could penetrate and exist within every level of society. In their view, new media constitute a catalyst for the emergence of a holistic society. Within this boundless space, humans would no longer be controlled and divided by ideology, socioeconomic status, ethnicity, or gender.

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