NEWS:
I'm doing a number of public appearances in the NYC area. I thought I
should get them out to you in case anybody feels like coming! I've
been a relative shut-in lately, and could use the human contact.

Feb 23-25: NY Comic-con
I'll be doing signings at the comic-con during the day, and two panels:
1. Vertigo: Looking Ahead
Friday, Feb. 23, 2007, 6:30-7:30pm

2. "Future Shocks: What Imaginative Literature Tells Us About Who We
Are and Where We're Going" is scheduled to take place on Saturday
2/24/2007 at 11:00:00 AM in Room 1E15.

Feb 28: Barnes and Noble, Astor Place
Talking about Testament (volume 2) and Get Back in the Box (now in
paperback)


TESTAMENT, VOLUME TWO
The second collected edition of my comic book, Testament, is now on
the stands. Please do get it if you're at all interested in this
series. I've included 10 pages of notes to the first two collections,
that should make the whole thing a lot clearer - or at least deeper
and more contextualized - for those of you who haven't been spending
as much time with Torah as I have these past few years. To buy it from
Amazon, you can click on this:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1401212018/douglasrushkoffA
(And I get a few quarters towards my own Amazon purchases, too! )

GET BACK IN THE BOX: now in paperback
Get Back in the Box is coming out next month (it may be available in
some places already) in a new, cheaper, paperback edition. Likewise:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060758708/douglasrushkoffA

NEW COLUMN:

This, from Discover Magazine, where I'm writing a new column every month:

Peer Review
"Too Clear for Comfort"

By Douglas Rushkoff

Like much of America, I, too, wanted my HDTV. Who wouldn't? In a
society where bigger is better and seeing is believing, 42 inches of
HiDef Plasma should be about all any of us needs to make sense of the
world from the safety of our living rooms.

Indeed, HD is a whole new viewing experience. A televised baseball
game used to mean interpreting a screen of blurry dots by their
positions on the field. Now, we see the stubble on the players'
cheeks. It's a level of reality and closeness we can't even get by
going to a game: sweat, pores, tensing jawbone. As for movies, well,
they look as good as in the theater. Better, even. A razor-sharp,
backlit, hyper-reality.

And once we try it, most consumers never turn back. Although HDTV sets
can cost several thousand dollars, they will have outsold their
predecessors by more than 89% this year. But what does this mean for
TV, the medium? Is clearer always better?

It's certainly different. The first program I watched in HiDef was The
Sopranos – arguably one of the best series on TV, representing
everything we've come to demand of an adult drama: believably foul
language, painstakingly authentic locations, and that all-important
"gritty realism." But watching my favorite gangsters bloody each other
up on HDTV no longer felt quite the same. I could see the seams in
their suits, the smudges on their sunglasses, and the wrinkles in
their car seats.

All those gritty details I thought I loved were now calling attention
to themselves. I felt like a scientist observing humans under a
microscope. These fictional Mafiosos looked like real people now,
capable of fear, anger, and, worst of all, sadism. Tony Soprano was no
longer a stand-in for everyman, but a sociopath. The screen wasn't a
symbolic mirror to my own life; it was a detailed portrait of a
violent world I didn't belong in and didn't want to.

That's because HDTV isn't just a better picture tube, but an entirely
different medium. With resolution up to 1920 x 1080 (compared with
analog TV's 400-or-so horizontal lines), a color palette increased by
a factor of two, and an aspect ratio that can cover my whole field of
vision instead of just a little square, high definition turns the TV
set from a flickering box into a reality simulation.

In fact, according to neuroscientists, HDTV offers more information
than the brain can process, allowing us to scan for changes the way we
do when processing a real life visual field. We're no longer inferring
an image off a self-contained flashing tube, but picking the relevant
details as if encountering a real world.

In short, the more HD my TV, the less room there is for me to
interpret it. As an image gets more detailed and fully immersive, it
becomes correspondingly less iconic and representative. Cartoon
characters have universal appeal because they are so simply drawn that
we can all see ourselves in them. The more fully wrought a character,
however, the more particular and less universal he becomes. He becomes
real.

Until now, TV has always been the province of iconic characters. We
laugh at the folks on Seinfeld because they are not real people but
loveable icons - archetypes, really, of personalities we recognize.
Even a killer like Tony Soprano has a certain appeal when he's a
cartoon. He's just a fat mafia guy, aping the mobsters he's seen in
the movies. Transplanting such characters into HD robs them of their
simplicity, and robs us of their universal nature.

It's not surprising that members of a rational, technology-driven age
would yearn towards clearer images in all our media. Science is about
observation, after all. Clarity. Microscopes revealed that the phantom
"humours" causing diseases were actually microbes, and telescopes
deconstructed the mythic constellations of astrology to reveal the
galaxies of astronomy. The more clearly we see things, the more
objectively, and less allegorically, we relate to them.

But what about when we bring the highest resolution technologies into
worlds best left in the realm of myth? This tendency to apply
scientific accuracy of observation to literature and even religion may
actually rob them of their greater power. Mel Gibson's controversial
and computer-generated depiction of Jesus's every bleeding wound in
Passion of Christ turned a universal gospel into the literal story of
one man's mutilation and death.

While such realistic simulations might be valuable for ambulance
training videos, their application across the full spectrum of human
storytelling may be a symptom of our society's continuing devaluation
of anything that can't be understood as fact, on a literal level, and
with no ambiguity. It's the same trend that's replacing fictional
television with so-called "reality" programming, interfaith dialogue
with intolerant fundamentalism, feel-good patriotism with strident
nationalism. There are no symbols, just real things. This isn't
science at all, but one-dimensional literalism.

Media theorist Marshall McLuhan always saw TV's roll as one of making
us "cooler" people. Its terribly low resolution invited terrifically
active participation and interpretation from its viewers. Yes, we were
watching – but we were also aware of ourselves watching, and capable
of engaging on our own terms. As TV gains resolution it becomes what
McLuhan would call a "hot" medium: one that captivates us, stokes our
emotions, and offers less room for interpretation. Cool media are
better for educating a population; hot media are better for getting
them angry enough to fight a war.

That's why, perhaps counterintuitively, I see HDTV breeding an even
less intelligent, less scientific culture than we already have. While
these technologies might let us see nature, observe the stars, and
even watch the news more clearly, we mustn't let them rob us of the
icons and metaphors we use to describe the things in our lives that
are less tangible and more allegorical, less a reality and more a
model. For without the ability to model, we don't have any science at
all.