Named one of the top ten “Most Influential Thinkers in the World” by MIT, Douglas Rushkoff is the author of more than a dozen bestselling books on media, technology, economics, and society, including Present Shock, Program or Be Programmed, and the upcoming Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus. They have been translated to over thirty languages, and have won numerous awards, including the Marshall McLuhan Award for Media Writing.

Winner of the Neil Postman award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity, Rushkoff also makes documentaries for PBS, including Generation Like, The Merchants of Cool, The Persuaders, and Digital Nation. Rushkoff speaks around the world, and coined such terms as “viral media,” “screenagers,” “digital natives,” and “social currency.”

Rushkoff runs the Institute for Media and Social Change at CUNY/Queens, where he also serves as Professor of Media Theory and Digital Economics. He’s Digital Literacy Advocate for Codecademy, and on the board of advisors for companies and organizations including MeetUp, the National Association of Media Literacy Education, the United Nations Commission on World Culture, and the Media Ecology Association.

Rushkoff may be best known for his early work bringing computer technology and the Internet into the public imagination, writing the first regular newspaper columns about digital culture for The New York Times, The Guardian, and other major periodicals. He has written for magazines from Esquire and Fast Company to Discover and Politico. His book, Cyberia: Life in the Trenches of Hyperspace, introduced America to the emerging digital landscape back in 1993. Media Virus launched the notion of viral media. Coercion explained how marketing was compromising the integrity of the net and predicted the dot.com crash years in advance.

More recently, his book Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age helped inspire today’s digital literacy movement, and his highly acclaimed bestseller, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now, explores the always-on, simultaneous society in which we live, as well as how this new temporal landscape influences media, culture, economics, politics, and meaning.

Rushkoff’s latest work, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity, looks at how the digital economy went wrong and what we can do to reclaim its promise.