Douglas Rushkoff

Douglas Rushkoff analyzes the way people, cultures, and institutions create, share, and influence each other's values. He sees "media" as the landscape where this interaction takes place, and "literacy" as the ability to participate consciously in it.

Rushkoff is the author of eight best-selling books on new media and popular culture, including Cyberia, Media Virus, Playing the Future, Coercion: Why We Listen to What "They" Say, and the novels Ecstasy Club, and Exit Strategy.

His radio commentaries air on NPR's All Things Considered, and his monthly column on cyberculture is distributed through the New York Times Syndicate and appears in over thirty countries. Rushkoff lectures about media, art, society, and change at conferences and universities around the world. He hosts and writes documentaries for PBS, Channel Four, and the BBC.

Rushkoff's award-winning Frontline documentary "The Merchants of Cool" was one of the most watched and most talked about documentaries of the year, and his interactive mini-series, Asylum, will be airing on the BBC next spring.

He has served as an adjunct professor of virtual culture at New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program for the past four years, as an Advisor to the United Nations Commission on World Culture, on the Board of Directors of the Media Ecology Association, and as a founding member of Technorealism. He is a Senior Fellow of the Markle Foundation, and a Center for Global Communications Fellow of the International University of Japan.

He regularly appears on TV shows from NBC Nightly News and Frontline to Larry King and Politically Incorrect. Rushkoff writes for magazines and newspapers including Time, The Guardian, Esquire, Paper, GQ and The Silicon Alley Reporter, and developed the Electronic Oracle software series for HarperCollins Interactive.

Rushkoff is on the board of several new media non-profits and companies, and regularly consults on new media arts and ethics to museums, governments, and universities, as well as Sony, TCI, advertising agencies, and other Fortune 500 companies.

Rushkoff graduated magna cum laude from Princeton University, received an MFA in Directing from California Institute of the Arts, a post-graduate fellowship (MFA) from The American Film Institute, and a Director's Grant from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. He is a certified stage fight choreographer, and plays blues piano and baby guitar.

He lives in New York City's East Village.