In books such as Cyberia: Life in the Trenches of Hyperspace (Harper San Francisco 1994), Media Virus! Hidden Agendas in Popular Culture (Ballantine, October 1994), and, most recently, Playing the Future: How Kids' Culture Can Teach Us to Thrive in an Age of Chaos (HarperCollins, 1996); in essays that have appeared everywhere from C-Net Online to Details and Esquire; in interviews with everybody from Larry King to Bill Moyers, Rushkoff continually breaks through platitudes and challenges our normal modes of thinking as he explains the world as he sees it today.
Fundamentally, he views cyberculture as a reach for community by people from many different walks of life. As it turns out, this is the reason he has chosen to study it. He explains, "I'm from Queens, N.Y. originally, where we had one great big barbecue at the end of the block. Then my dad got wealthier and we moved to the 'burbs where everyone had their own barbecues but there was no community. That's what has motivated me ever since."
But why cyberculture? "I suppose the inspiration,ΓÇ¥ Rushkoff explains, ΓÇ£was an insight that the same thing was going on in a variety of different areas: Internet, fantasy role playing, psychedelic visionquests, cyberpunk fiction, and media hacking--but no one had seemed to tie it together."
One who thought Rushkoff is succeeding in doing that is the late Timothy Leary, who so esteemed Rushkoff, as a colleague and as a friend, that he made him proprietor of his literary estate.
