‘Digital Nation:’ Must see TV, brilliant web-content
The broadcast premier of Frontline’s Digital Nation is 9 PM on Tuesday Feb.2. While I’m sure it is riveting TV, as web-content it is brilliant.
The “Digital Nation: Life on the Virtual Frontier” site has the full broadcast along with web-only content in sections titled “Living Faster,” Relationships,” Waging War,” Virtual Worlds,” and “Learning.” Here’s something from the intro to spark your curiosity:
In Digital Nation: Life on the Virtual Frontier, FRONTLINE presents an in-depth exploration of what it means to be human in a 21st-century digital world. Continuing a line of investigation she began with the 2008 FRONTLINE report Growing Up Online, award-winning producer Rachel Dretzin embarks on a journey to understand the implications of living in a world consumed by technology and the impact that this constant connectivity may have on future generations. “I’m amazed at the things my kids are able to do online, but I’m also a little bit panicked when I realize that no one seems to know where all this technology is taking us, or its long-term effects,” says Dretzin.
Joining Dretzin on this journey is commentator Douglas Rushkoff, a leading thinker and writer on the digital revolution — and one-time evangelist for technology’s positive impact. “In the early days of the Internet, it was easy for me to reassure people about what it would mean to bring digital technology into their lives,” says Rushkoff, who has authored 10 books on media, technology and culture. “Now I want to know whether or not we are tinkering with something more essential than we realize.”
via FRONTLINE: digital nation: introduction | PBS.
If you are still here instead of watching Digital Nation, let me try one more spark. The “Health & Healing” subsection of “Virtual Worlds” provides an intimate, close look at an Iraq war Vet being treated for PTSD with virtual reality based exposure therapy. Tinkering with the essential, as Rushkoff calls it, is often value-neutral, what we do with it–in this instance healing broken soldiers–makes all the difference. Digital Nation can help us understand what we are doing with all these new technologies, and what those uses might mean for us as individuals and a society.
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[...] PTSD. I was fascinated; I had read about it but had never seen it first-hand. So I turned to the excellent website that expands on the broadcast and found an extended video from a session (from which the above [...]