Tart and salty coverage of the Play Ethic, and its umbrella consultancy New Integrity, from an excellent leftist web-magazine called Seven Oaks.
The problem with the Kanes and the Leadbeaters of this world is their zealous insistence on an online, open source technological, networked cyber-utopia which confuses familiarity with the fads of the day with serious critical enquiry. The result of which is a drunken misalliance of Chicken Soup for the Soul touchy-feely network spiritualism and the crass market genuflecting offered up in books like New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman’s best-selling business bible The Lexus and the Olive Tree.
It really needn’t be said that the dedicated players and Pro-Ams (“…climbing says more about who I am than my job. Journalism is my job but climbing is my passion.”) who best typify this dawning age are noticeable by their absence from the coal face of the information economy. The new media age has yet to produce the shorter working hours that Kane yearns for, nor has it produced a new generation of players: for every ad agency creative loitering at the water cooler, for every down-with-it pro-am actor slacking off from the PR company, there are too many McJob workers taking Leadbetter’s “Living on Thin Air” slogan to dangerously literal extremes.
As the precarity post below shows, I (nor my colleagues at Demos) don't underestimate the scale of the reform and activism required to build a social settlement that could cope with players and pro-ams as our mainstream identity, as meaningfully active people.
Much to respond to here, but not enough time in my play-and-care days. Let me do so obliquely by pointing you to a piece I've just had published in the Learning Teaching Scotland magazine Connected, about the relationship between ICT, Play and Education. In short, it's not just about training people for a market-future, but about composing a life-narrative of a creative society worth living in:
The challenges of techno-mobility might also be opportunities to think again about our institutional frameworks for learning. We could even profitably return to notions of the 'learning web', first proposed in the 1970s by educational radical Ivan Illich in his provocative book Deschooling Society, which saw the whole city and environment as a scene for ubiquitous learning and understanding. 'Playing around on street corners', with wireless capability, could take on a whole new dimension.
Yet the wider societal context to this is important. This new techno-literacy – which kids are assembling by themselves in their own largely unregulated time and space – is an honest response to a fundamental shift in the structures of post-modern life: the life of flows and networks, the power of culture and ideas, summed up by the 'information age'. Almost entirely autonomously, children are using play to make themselves imaginatively capable for this new world.
And a methodological note: the good player feels, and then she touches.
Recent Comments