Each week at our Applications class we hear from a guest speaker, and a group of students respond to the speaker from the previous week. We heard from, then reacted to Doug Rushkoff's talk about his new book, Program or be Programmed.

The Talk

Rushkoff’s main point was that at a time when so much of our lives are influenced by, and mediated by digital technology it’s important to foster a sense of curiosity, exploration, questioning and understanding of digital systems. Simplistically, we need to understand the biases, traits and construction of tools like social networks so that we can make good decisions and maintain independence of thought and action - basically so we don’t get lead up the garden path by marketers and evil-doers. The other main point that I took away from his talk was his advocacy for a peer-to-peer system of value tied to effort, not arbitrary financial values - which as we’ve seen are built on somewhat flimsy ground.

Reaction

The group - me, Fernanda Bak, Noah Crowley, Cyrus Von Hochstetter and Yoonjo Shin - all lovely people - talked extensively about Rushkoff’s ideas. To be honest, we didn’t feel that he was saying anything massively novel - it was common sense to us that people should understand as much of the world they live in as possible, but that people’s interests would obviously dictate what parts of the world they seek to understand.

We didn’t really need to prove that the system of currency and finance that has been created up until now is open for abuse and manipulation - other people have made that point eminently on our behalf.

Implementation & Presentation

We decided to demonstrate a simple skill, how to make bread, as an example of the value of understanding a system/the world around us and the exchange of a skill/value between people.

We would also create an opportunity and a system for people in our class, who otherwise might not know that their peers have particular skills, to talk and share simple skills. In essence, we wanted our presentation to roll the two main points of his talk and show how achievable (and in a sense normal/common-sensible) they are.

We got together at my house, and I showed the group how to make a simple yeast bread. We filmed the process, and talked about how it related to the talk. We then designed a card-trading mechanic for the class, and set up a simple shared spreadsheet where skills could be offered or requested.

On the day of our presentation we showed our short film to the rest of the class - which got a good reaction. We handed out cards for people to write down their skill to exchange with others and gave a simple demo of what we wanted people to do.

As a final piece of the presentation we asked everybody to go to a shared spreadsheet to document skills that they could offer others, and what they themselves wanted to learn - creating a resource of 140 skills on offer or in demand.

So, that’s it - it was a very busy week between Rushkoff’s talk and the presentation, but I’m proud of the results.