Program or Be Programmed

  Postman, Neil. Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. New York: Vintage Books, 1993.

  Rheingold, Howard. The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. Boston: MIT Press, 1993.

  Rushkoff, Douglas. Cyberia: Life in the Trenches of Hyperspace. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1994.

  Shiffman, Daniel. Learning Processing: A Beginner’s Guide to Programming Images, Animation, and Interaction. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann, 2008.

  Shirky, Clay. Here Comes Everybody. New York: Penguin, 2009.

  Stephenson, Neal. In the Beginning Was the Command Line. New York: HarperCollins, 1999.

  Turkle, Sherry. Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. New York: Basic Books, 2011.

  Wark, McKenzie. A Hacker Manifesto. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004.

  Weiner, Norbert. The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society. Cambridge: Da Capo Press, 1988 (first published in 1950).

  Zittrain, Jonathan. The Future of the Internet—And How to Stop It. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009.

  DOCUMENTARIES

  PBS: Frontline: Digital Nation, by Rachel Dretzen and Douglas Rushkoff. Available streaming online at http://pbsdigitalnation.org.

  BBC: The Virtual Revolution. http://www.bbc.co.uk/virtualrevolution/.

  FREE RESOURCES TO LEARN PROGRAMMING:

  Scratch —MIT’s site for kids, but easy enough for adults. http://scratch.mit.edu/

  Learn Python the Hard Way—A very accessible approach to a very useful computer language. http://learnpythonthehardway.com/index.

  Learning Processing—tutorials by Daniel Shiffman. http://www.learningprocessing.com

  SIMPLE—Some Apple II developers wrote this beginners’ language back in 1995. http://www.simplecodeworks.com.

  Microsoft Tutorials on Visual Basic—Microsoft’s tutorials on how to learn Visual Basic are actually quite good for the beginner. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vbasic/ms789097.aspx.

  LOGOS—For educators interested in a very easy programming language to teach elementary school children, visit http://www.terrapinlogo.com for a system to purchase or http://www.softronix.com/logo.html for free resources.

  For more up-to-date information, see

  http://rushkoff.com/program.

  About the Author

  Winner of the first Neil Postman award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity, Douglas Rushkoff has written a dozen best-selling books on media and society, including Cyberia, Media Virus, Coercion (winner of the Marshall McLuhan Award), Get Back in the Box, and Life Inc. He has made the PBS “Frontline” documentaries Digital Nation, The Persuaders, and Merchants of Cool.

  A columnist for The Daily Beast and Arthur Magazine, his articles have been regularly published in The New York Times and Discover, among many other publications. His radio commentaries air on NPR and WFMU, his opeds appear in the New York Times, and he is a familiar face on television, from ABC News to The Colbert Report.

  Rushkoff has taught at New York University and the New School, played keyboards for the industrial band PsychicTV, directed for theater and film, and worked as a stage fight choreographer. He lives in New York State with his wife, Barbara, and daughter Mamie.

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