Douglas Rushkoff

Thanks to social media, teens are able to directly interact with their culture - celebrities, movies, brands - in ways never before possible. But is that real empowerment? Or do marketers hold the upper hand? Douglas Rushkoff explores how the teen quest for identity has migrated to the web – and exposes the game of cat-and-mouse that corporations are playing with them.

PBS Frontline takes an in-depth look at the multibillion-dollar "persuasion industries" of advertising and public relations and how marketers have developed new ways of integrating their messages deeper into the fabric of our lives. Through sophisticated market research methods to better understand consumers and by turning to the little-understood techniques of public relations to make sure their messages come from sources we trust, marketers are crafting messages that resonate with an increasingly cynical public.

Over a single generation, the Web and digital media have remade nearly every aspect of modern culture, transforming the way we work, learn, and connect in ways that we’re only beginning to understand. FRONTLINE producer Rachel Dretzin (Growing up Online) teams up with one of the leading thinkers of the digital age, Douglas Rushkoff (The Persuaders, Merchants of Cool), to continue to explore life on the virtual frontier. The film is the product of a unique collaboration with visitors to the Digital Nation website, who for the past year have been able to react to the work in progress and post their own stories online.

Ten years in the making, PORNOGRAPHY: THE SECRET HISTORY OF CIVILISATION is a six-part series, which tells for the first time on British television the history of pornography. This landmark series charts the changes in imagery prompted by the advent of new technologies over thousands of years: from ancient times to print, photography, film, video and the Internet.