Virtual Interview with PBS 'Digital Nation' host Douglas Rushkoff

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Metanomics January 27 - Digital Nation with Douglas Rushkoff

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PBS Frontline - Digital Nation: Life on the Virtual Frontier Correspondent Interviewed in Virtual World

Metanomics is a talk show filmed in the virtual world of Second Life. The first show of their spring season airs on Wednesday, January 27 at 12 pm PST, with host Robert Bloomfield interviewing Douglas Rushkoff, correspondent and writer of Frontline’s Digital Nation: Life on the Virtual Frontier – a PBS documentary that explores how our lives have changed due to our digital world.

The show will be filming live in Second Life and can also be viewed live at the Metanomics site.

From how we learn, work, play and even make war, Digital Nation documents what we’ve gained – and what we’ve lost.

Can a love affair blossom in a virtual world? Are we seeing the end of attending a classroom in person? What happens when you wage war from thousands of miles away? As Digital Nation asks: “Is technology moving faster than we can adapt to it?”

The film, which airs on Tuesday, Feb 2, at 9pm ET on PBS, is a collaboration with individuals who have participated in the Digital Nation website:

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Digital Nation Trailer

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“The Digital Nation Web site launched more than 10 months ago as part of FRONTLINE’s first multiplatform project, featuring short online video reports in addition to a mosaic of user-generated content called Your Stories designed to let visitors participate in the documentary process. The site also features a producers’ blog, embeddable video, and an archive of online events with expert guests.”

Douglas Rushkoff will discuss the conception and future of Digital Nation, which broke new ground by meshing a website with a television documentary, and plans to get feedback from the documentary’s subjects after the show airs.

Rushkoff will also talk about his most recent book Life, Inc., noted as one of the best business books of 2009. Life, Inc. takes aim at the flaws in the “operating system” of corporatism which reaches into all aspects of our economic and personal lives.

Rushkoff argues for more direct interactions between people, unmediated by artificial corporate structures. Join us to hear about the role of virtual worlds and digital technology in the peer-to-peer relationships Rushkoff sees as the right way forward…

Guest Biography

Douglas Rushkoff

Winner of the first Neil Postman award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity, Douglas Rushkoff is an author, teacher, and documentarian who focuses on the ways people, cultures, and institutions create, share, and influence each other’s values. He teaches media studies at the New School University, serves as technology columnist for The Daily Beast, and lectures around the world.

He has just released his most important book to date: an analysis of the corporate spectacle called Life Inc. for RandomHouse, as well as a series of short films called Life Inc Dispatches.
He has written and hosted two award-winning Frontline documentaries – The Merchants of Cool looked at the influence of corporations on youth culture, and The Persuaders, about the cluttered landscape of marketing, and new efforts to overcome consumer resistance.