The Play Ethic

Play in a quiet voice: Major Fun visits Israel

One of our play correspondants has found himself in one of the least playful places in the world at the moment - Jerusalem. Bernie DeKoven, guru of the New Games movement in the seventies and an indefatigable innovator with social games, has been giving "laughter" seminars to a range of Israeli teachers and therapists (including some excellent cross-partisan organisations like Hand In Hand). 

Bernie's certainly not political in any way, but I'm moved by his latest post (and others), and delighted by the citation:

As for the Gaza thing: if you're Jewish or Palestinian, it was a violence that was done to you, even if the violence was not your doing - a deep, shocking, deafening violence that was so thunderous you can't hear much of anything else - your family, maybe, your neighbors, your friends. You certainly can't hear anything that comes from the "other side." Not love, not grief, not caring, not explanation, not apology, not words of peace. And most definitely not play.

Play is one of those words that can only be spoken in a "still, small voice," that in times like these can be only be heard over the din of war by children and puppies. The rest of us have to wait for quiet, inside and out. Even clowns can't make themselves loud enough. Even people like the Israeli group called "Pharsh - the official military of the silly revolution" (thanks for the link, Pat Kane), or the "laughter therapists" you nevertheless might find doing their work in the bomb sheters in S'deroth; can't be silly enough to change anything - not right now...

...Teaching laughter, fun, games, play - it's a funny kind of work, a funny kind of gift we have to bring. Not anything that you might call a "cause." Not anything that you might think of as revolutionary. And yet, something having very much to do with peace, after all.

As I wrote in a recent post, there is some precedent in games and play as a force for social cohesion in Israel. One can only hope that the diplomatic "game" about to be conducted by America in the region can display as much grace, poise, imagination and sympathy as Bernie does in his workshops. 

Comment is Free: As banking eats itself... learn from the musicians

This is a column I've just written for the Guardian's Comment Is Free page - light-hearted but with some serious points underneath about how musicians have already adapted to tougher economic times. 

* * *

As the banking system eats itself and every trading week begins with an unhappy Monday, most working pop musicians look on the headlines with a mixture of ennui and schadenfreude. As industries contract and shatter around us, we sit in our thrumming little tour-buses and smile bitterly. Because, truth be told, rock'n'roll got its recession in early.

For example, we know all about sophisticated computers and their algorithms sending financial transactions out of control. Ever since Napster started up ten years ago, and free file-sharing on the internet became the opium of the masses, the music business's business model has been in a long, screaming death-spiral.

How would you cope, Mr Tractor-Maker, if an entire generation had grown up believing that they had the right to pay nothing for your basic commodity? Not any better than we have, I'll bet. We're all used to it now, and are trimming our sails accordingly: the musician's mantra now is "how do we make a living?", rather than "how do we dream of a fortune?" But puh-leeze, don't talk to us about collapsing markets.

And when it comes to pleas for state intervention in private industry, to desperately maintain basic viability? We've been there, done that, got the bootlegged t-shirt.

One of the bizarre spectacles of the music-biz in the last few years has been the procession of spruced-up, dressed-down music svengalis (yes, Fergal Sharkey in a suit) heading towards the offices of MPs, Ministers and European Commissioners. Their plea? Pass some laws so that some musicians can get paid something from all this downloading activity – essentially, a "music poll tax" on internet service providers. 

Hunter S. Thompson once called the music business (only slightly unfairly) “a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side”. The idea of funding them like dear Auntie BBC would have the old libertarian pistol fiend combusting in his funeral urn.

And if you're looking for people to make austere lifestyle changes to get through the current slump, we musos are elegantly wasted experts. Everywhere I go, I see musicians realizing that it's not enough just to be a musician anymore. The role-model is more Andy Warhol than Keith Richards. That is, multi-skilled and enterprising about parlaying their 'brand' in various forms of old and new media. Rather than so baked in narcotics that they'd still be around (along with the cockroaches) after the neutron bombs go off.

If you want to do some field-work on this, then visit the foyer of a famous old London rock hotel like The Columbia. Any day, you will see gaggles of pierced, pipe-cleaner libertines tumble spectacularly towards the bar. But the only speed they're looking to instantly mainline when they hit the couch is the free broadband wireless (and the electrical power points).

There they sit, pale faces bathed by the unearthly glow not of crack pipes but of Mac Books. They film each other with mini-camcorders and upload their cavortings to their fan-based social networks, with whom they communicate furiously and fulsomely. If they have their headsets on, they even look like slumming-it commodity traders.

From sex'n'drugs'n'rock'n'roll, as the pop consultant David Jennings puts it, to nets'n'blogs'n'rock'n'roll. If we are entering a new age of responsibility and hard work, as the way-cooler-than-any-rock-star President Obama announced last week, then the average career-conscious musician (or at least those not still sucking at the corporate teat) has already answered the Presidential call.

We're all building websites, touring like crazy, cutting together our own videos, using digital tech to make quality music cheaply, plastering everything from skateboards to babygros with our merchandising logos, and keeping a constant dialogue with fans via all these wonderful social tools.

To continue the Stones references, musicians are having to revise the classic Charlie Watts definition of rock'n'roll: "it's five years of playing, and 20 years of hanging around". Now its more like five years playing, five years typing, five years marketing, five years doing your accounts - with maybe five years left for nervous breakdowns/debauchery/some occasional songwriting.

And if you believe Radio Four's Evan Davis, rock'n'roll is to blame for the financial crash in any case. When David Bowie took a cash advance on the potential future earnings of his back catalogue in 2004, Davis claims he heralded the "securitisation" trend that led banks into the financial rehab-centres they currently occupy.

Indeed, the Thin White Duke provides a fitting epitaph to the current meltdown. "Ashes to ashes, funk to funky/We know RBS is a subsidy junkie/Strung out on heaven's high/Hitting an all-time low". Well, no matter how bad it gets, at least you can always rely on the musician to write an exploitative – sorry, evocative - couplet or two about it. Let's go to work, y'all.

Lily Allen, critical theorist: 'The Fear'

I'm a bit late to the party on this one, but I'm thoroughly rocked by Lily Allen's current song and video, 'The Fear':

Life's about film stars and less about mothers
It's all about fast cars and passing each other
But it doesn't matter cause I’m packing plastic
and that's what makes my life so fucking fantastic

And I am a weapon of massive consumption
and it's not my fault it's how I'm programmmed to function
I'll look at the sun and I'll look in the mirror
I'm on the right track yeah I'm on to a winner

I don't know what's right and what's real anymore
I don't know how I’m meant to feel anymore
When we think it will all become clear
'Cuz I’m being taken over by The Fear

Now that's a great artist, her radar on full. She's in the midst of her high-consumerist, high-celebrity life, yet able to talk just as clearly about the anxieties and worries that everyone has about living in commodity-drenched, sharply-meritocratic British society. And she does it as a hip, smart, pretty woman. The five-star Observer review gets it absolutely right.

She doubly affects me because, in my other life as a musician, I recently brought out a song (with my brother Greg in Hue And Cry), called Headin' For A Fall (available now!!) which touches all the same topics. But as you'll see from the video below, there's a difference between a carefree twenty-something girl capturing the zeitgeist perfectly, and two careworn forty-somethings agonising sweatily about the near-future. Still, it's nice to be out there signifying at the same time. All power to you, Ms. Allen. 

 

White lies coming out of every mouth around me baby and I
Simply don’t know who to believe
Blue skies are pixellated on a screen above my head
And I wish that it only was a dream

I’m reeling from the Real because it hits me like I’ve run into a wall
Better get me some momentum because otherwise I’m heading for a fall

Big time politicians standing on their favorite stage tonight
Wonder how else they get their kix
Apple pie and motherhood and wireless in the neighbourhood
Oh my, we need a brand new bag of tricks

Instinctively I feel that it’s important to be stylishly appalled
Though lately I do recognise it’s likely that we’re heading for a fall

(For explanation of the lyric, go to the Hue And Cry Music Club)

New regime, same game-theory? Robert Wright reconsidered

More American musings, but with a specific play-theory angle. As the new Administration has been re-orienting itself as diplomacy-and-human-rights friendly - with Guantanamo scheduled for closure, and the previously belligerent Hillary Clinton now advocating "smart" (or is that really soft?) power - I've been recalling a prescient essay from 2003 in the New York Times. 

Robert Wright is the author of Non-Zero: The Logic of Human Destiny, a book which gained some favour in the closing years of the Clinton administration. Bill's summary of it is pretty good:

There is an astonishing new book out, been out a few months, by a man named Robert Wright, called Nonzero - kind of a weird title unless you're familiar with game theory. But in game theory, a zero-sum game is one where, in order for one person to win, somebody has to lose. A non-zero-sum game is a game in which you can win and the person you're playing with can win, as well. 

And the argument of the book is that, notwithstanding all the terrible things that happened in the 20th century - the abuses of science by the Nazis, the abuses of organization by the communists, all the things that continue to be done in the name of religious or political purity - essentially, as societies grow more and more connected, and we become more interdependent, one with the other, we are forced to find more and more non-zero-sum solutions. That is, ways in which we can all win.

And that's basically the message I've been trying to preach for eight years here...We have to have an expanding idea of who is in our family. And we in the United States, because we're so blessed, have particular responsibilities to people not only within our borders who have been left behind, but beyond our borders who otherwise will never catch up if we don't do our part. Because we are all part of the same human family, and because, actually, life is more and more a non-zero-sum game, so that the better they do, the better we'll do. 

So strange to read this, in the afterglow of Obama's extended-hand-meets-unclenched-fist Inaugural speech. And to imagine that such theories of global interdependence might be picked up again, after the bloody interregnum of post 9/11 America. Wright's essay is written exactly two years after that date, with the "War on Terror" already taken to Iraq, and the sense of anticipation of another, and worse, bio- or nuclear-terrorist attack on American soil pretty high. 

The Three-Day Week: more rest, less work, more play...and better?

Signs that our economic crisis are compelling politicians to think the unthinkable. There are several reports today that UK ministers are considering imposing a three-day working week on large areas of British industry and services. With the general tightening of finance and credit, the suggestion from both business and government is that it would be better to have people working three days out of five at 70-80% of wages, with the gap covered by a government subsidy, than have the businesses collapse and risk the far greater social expense of millions more on unemployment benefit.

For those of us who have been advocating regulations towards a shorter working week, for a whole range of different reasons - to benefit from the productive gains of technology, to address our deep disatisfactions with our parenting or community lives, to expand opportunities for self-development and mental health - this suggestion seems more like an opportunity, than the "dark threat" the Independent renders it as. 

As Jonathan Gershuny and Madeleine Bunting reminded us several years ago, the original 'three-day week' in the UK of the early seventies - instituted as a response to energy shortages caused by industrial dispute - had a very small negative effect on general productivity levels, way smaller than the 40% drop you might have expected. (I found a discussion on Channel Four's community website which backs this up anecdotally). 

There's a classic unreconstructed quote in one of the Independent pieces, covering JCB's decision to adopt this policy: "All the wives have given their men lists of things to do since the hours disappeared," says a foreman varnishing his door. But again, those of us who are interested in the power of play have to ask: is this a true picture? Do people, when given more free time from work, simply turn to leisure-and-recreation? ("Gardening leave", they call it in the newspaper industry, when a writer or editor who had been poached by another paper was being paid not to work - ie, add value and quality - for his new organisation). 

One would hope that things have changed since the seventies, and that there might be a significant amount of workers - in these 'quality-of-life' conscious times - who would welcome and embrace this de-centering of work (and to a degree consumption) in their lives. There are so many social indications - from the rise in demand for literary festivals, allotments and personal training, to the attractions of social media (now becoming real utilities like The School of Everything, Gumtree and Freecycle), to the incessant anxieties over parenting - that we want more time and space away from the workplace. 

Why might we want this? Well, to explore these highly-connected, highly-informed, highly-sensitised selves and communities that we have become, in the network society. And maybe, as a result, this free-time will give us a new perspective on the kind of products and services that we have been making and delivering. If it's a "New Green Deal"  that both the US and the UK are promoting as the ultimate kick-starter for prosperity again, then that can't be just construction jobs - it will also require some degree of innovation and entrepreneurship, about how we can live sustainable lifestyles that feel as replete and complex as the ones we've left behind. I think some more guaranteed free-time in our lives to explore different lifestyle options - and maybe open up new green markets, products and services as a result of these explorations - might be not a temporary measure, but an essential shift.

Again, I point you to Benjamin Barber's fabulous essay in The Nation, where he suggests that the financial crisis gives us a real opportunity to re-assess what we regard as 'valuable activity' in our lives - and one of those re-assessments might be that if we aim to reduce our consumption, we'll be able to work less, and invest in life more:

What if Obama committed the United States to reducing consumer spending from 70 percent of GDP to 50 percent over the next ten years, bringing it to roughly where Germany's GDP is today? The Germans have a commensurate standard of living and considerably greater equality. Imagine all the things we could do without having to shop: play and pray, create and relate, read and walk, listen and procreate--make art, make friends, make homes, make love.

Sound too soft? Too idealistic? If we are to survive the collapse of the unsustainable consumer capitalism that has possessed our body politic over the past three decades, idealism must become the new realism. For if the contest is between the material body defined by solipsistic acquisitiveness and the human spirit defined by imagination and compassion, then a purely technical economic response is what will be too soft, promising little more than a restoration of that shopaholic hell of hyper-consumerism that occasioned the current disaster.

Amen. Let's see opportunity in this crisis - the play of possibilities in what might seem the darkest of situations.

Obama Notions (2): Between the Puritan and the Booty-Bumper

So much commentary out there on Obama's inaugural speech - and some brilliant stuff: Micheal Eric Dyson on his rhetorical debt to the preachers of the black Church, John Nichols on his subtle citations of Tom Paine (the radical who wanted to abolish slavery but was rejected by the 'founding fathers'), Slate.com's glossary on the key phrases, or the New York Times' corralling of previous inaugural speechwriters. And doubtless scores more to come. 

But there are a few policy messages that are worth sifting critically through the agenda of this blog. Emotionally and culturally (see my previous post) I'm very much a supporter of the Obama presidency. Yet I can't help but confess to a few tense thoughts as the words sink in. 

Straight away, it must be said that one of the dominant overtones of the speech was the familiar, dour and duteous call of the Puritan/Protestant work ethic (in passing, Jonathan Freedland notes that only Protestant pastors occupied the inaugural stage). But to my ears this often incoherently struggled with a different discourse entirely - one that holds that America is an improvisation, an evolving process, indeed an 'imperfect union'. 

Take this early section, after Obama has neatly laid out the environmental, geopolitical, social and economic challenges of his presidency: 

We remain a young nation, but in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things. The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history; to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea, passed on from generation to generation: the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness. 

In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of short-cuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted - for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame. Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things - some celebrated but more often men and women obscure in their labour, who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom.

I'm certainly not the first to point out that the American national aim of the "pursuit of happiness", in full measure or not, requires a certain irrepressible optimism about the future - which is, if not a 'childish thing', then at least 'child-like', in the sense of retaining an indefatigable hopefulness (that key Obama buzz-word) in the possibility of personal and social progress. 

Obama is right to transcendentalise the impulse behind this will-to-happiness (which I, and quite a few others, would say was the continuing legacy of our playful early selves). It is indeed "precious", a "noble gift", a "God-given promise" (and given the legitimacy that "non-believers" were given in a later part of the speech, a 'nature-given' promise too). If humans are basically "equal" and "free", then they are empowered to shape their lives as they will - and yes, if they like, to choose a "better history". 

But there is an existential openness about the American pursuit of happiness - a strong possibility that things may be messy and vibrantly emergent, rather than normative and easily consensual. "Common purpose" may come from the innovation of the commons, but it isn't guaranteed or scriptable.  Isn't this what being a "liberal" really means? You could further argue that this experimental approach is what defines the very youthfulness of a still "young" nation. So if Americans really did entirely put "childish things behind them", might they not also risk extinguishing one of the core energies behind the national renewal that Obama yearns for? (The websites Boing Boing and World-Changing come to mind here - exemplars of how light-heartedness, experiment and commitment can be easily combined).

Obama Notions (1): The Soulitarian

As the cartoon from Steve Bell on the left suggests, Obama's inauguration is a event for the citizens of the world to reckon with. Like millions of others in the blogosphere, I'm taking bites at this over the next few days, to muse on what he said, and how it relates to my own aspirations and projects. 

A very personal observation to begin with. The power of the day only really got to me last thing on Tuesday night, when I was sitting on a suburban train leaving Glasgow, listening to Stevie Wonder's Songs In The Key of Life on my iPhone (my all-time favourite album, and Obama's too - they got married to its soundtrack). There's a song on there called 'Black Man' - a real seventies' era black power anthem - and the lyrics to the chorus stunningly anticipate Obama's social achievement as an African-American:

We pledge allegiance/All our lives
To the magic colours red, blue and white
But we all must be given/The liberty that we defend
For with justice not for all men/History will repeat again
It's time we learned/This world was made for all men

I remember first hearing Stevie Wonder on the radio in the seventies as a wee boy, and thinking instantly, "I want some of the energy, joy and power of that music", without really understanding till much later where that power came from. Watching the coverage over the last few days makes it clear to me that, culturally at least, this is a soul/r'n'b presidency - and that's not just because voices like Wonder, Usher, Mary J. Blige, and Will.I.Am, Aretha at the inauguration and Beyonce at the first dance, were so prominent. 

The rhetoric of common purpose is something Obama has explicitly invoked throughout his campaign - but it takes its clout from Martin Luther King and the collective determination of the civil rights movement. As the historians put it, soul music wasn't just the soundtrack to that movement, but an exemplification of it. The sanctuary and intensity of the Gospel church was taken out of the halls to sanctify the wider society, preaching a secular gospel of the uniting power of love, sex and romance.

As a far-off and entranced white boy in Scotland, I always sensed there was a societal future implied by the very grooves, harmonies and performances in this music (never mind the political specifics of a lyric like 'Black Man'). So it's peculiarly moving to me to see one element of that future come about in the election of Barack Hussein Obama. And in terms of the title of this blog, the legacy of this music could never be a better example of what a 'play ethic' might mean in practice: literally, an inclusive, attractive humanism generated and reinforced by the kind of play, players and playing that comprises soul and r'n'b. 

The inauguration couldn't have come to a more appropriately funky close than the words of the Reverend Joseph Lowery, a civil rights veteran: "Lord, we ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get back, when brown can stick around, when yellow will be mellow, when the red man can get ahead, man, and when white will embrace what is right." Obama's laughter at Lowery's sixties street-fightin'-slang came from the same capacious and ironic place that enabled him to make public sense of his ex-Pastor Jeremiah Wright's incendiary comments on America. 

Dignity, style, cool and grace under pressure was the aesthetic glory of soul culture in the harsh times. When I watch Obama's habitual hands-in-pockets, Marvin-Gaye-esque stroll, it's as eloquent to me as any of his speeches. Before you get to the policy platform (which I'll try to do tomorrow), you have to admit how much he literally incarnates a better, more complex future for America. And for that, as Rev. Lowery said, Amen and Amen and Amen.

Wars, Boys, SEALS and Toys: a blast of Ralph Osterhout

The last thing we are around here is blithe or starry-eyed about the power of play - it's an often dark and dangerous principle of possibility in the human condition. To 'take reality lightly', as the essential philosophical definition has it, does not necessarily imply (though it doesn't exclude) taking reality ethically. (Thus my quest for a 'play ethic': how do we monitor and direct our elemental playfulness, without drying it up at source?)

A case in point is the eternal relationship between play, toys and war (I've explored this previously in this Guardian article, this blog category and this Delicious tag). A wander round the iTunes videoblog section yesterday turned up this startling character - Ralph Osterhaut (interviews here and here) He's been presenting at an entertainment conference, with the title 'Toys That Find Their Way Into Combat'. 

It's hard to know how to begin to respond to this guy. As the interviews above reveal, Osterhout is a driven, possibly damaged character, who seeks a certain psychological refuge in engineering stuff that can give you extended powers - of vision, subterfuge, detection of enemies. (Wired tells us he even pretended to live the Riviera life of Fleming-era James Bond as a young man, keeping strange guns under his seat). The tough-guy military talk ("he'd jump on that quicker than a tramp on a muffin", "these Navy Seals guys are superfit, near-enough triathletes, you just wouldn't believe") protests just a little too much - though it surely gives the male toy execs he usually deals with a thrill. 

And since 9/11, Osterhout has clearly been hanging around the military-digital complex a lot. He presents himself as a transmission belt between the toy manufacturers and the military contractors - miniaturising and computerising in each domain, and gleefully transferring best-practice to the other. 

But it's the gusto with which he throws himself at the problems of American hi-tech ground-warfare in the Middle East that shows the scary end of play culture. You can't deny Osterhout's identity as a creative engineer, his cognitive capacity for playing with materials and structural possibilities. But ally that to the 'Cowboys and Indians' play impulse - what Sutton-Smith calls contestive and collective forms of play - and Osterhout becomes a man-child playing with the "real" men that seemed to be absent from his abusive early childhood. With lethal consequences.

It may be no surprise that Osterhout's geopolitics are an equally childish bluster - "terrorism is here to stay, my friends", "Abdul is using our equipment to fix his tv", "most sniper killings are inter-ethnic fire between Sunnis and Shias" (as if the steamrollering of Iraq by American shock-and-awe, and their absence of a nation-building plan afterwards, had nothing to do with unleashing that kind of emnity in the first place). 

Osterhout does try to forge some ploughshares out of his cybernetic swords at the end - little helicopters that can video disaster areas, techno-glasses that can restore sight to the sight-impaired. But as our soulful President takes his office, soaring on thermals of warm rhetoric, it's useful to listen to this voice from the other side of American power - where prodigious invention can harness itself to an impoverished military world-view. 

And for play advocates, too, characters like Osterhout are just as cautionary. He makes the need to build a kind of psychological development spiral for play extremely acute (see Gwen Gordon's studies). For wherever this guy's playfulness comes from, we need to be very careful about where it's going. 

Poets' Day: the Mike Wallace Interviews

On this Poets' Day (that's Piss Off Early, Tomorrow's Saturday), I want to share one of my guiltiest Americana pleasures: the Mike Wallace Interview archive at Texas University. Pointed this way by Boing Boing, it's a webcast video collection of mid-50's interviews by the legendary news anchor Mike Wallace - who until recently plied a wrinkly trade in the current 60 Minutes show on CBS, but here looks like a stunning candidate for the lead role in Mad Men. 

What is truly bizarre about this show is the combination of the fabulously precise questioning of Wallace, the weird all-culture spectrum of guests - from Aldous Huxley and Kirk Douglas, from Diana Dors to Erich Fromm - and, most head-wrenchingly, the cigarette-sponsor endorsements that Wallace has to painstakingly perform at the head of each show. It's a bit like watching David Dimbleby getting gussied up and shilling for MacDonald's every week at the beginning of Question Time (yes, I know you'd pay good money for that).  

No embed function, I'm afraid, but go there and enjoy yourself hugely. For me, in any case, it demonstrates that there's always been a profound seriousness in the Republic, that the Obama era - see this amazing photo slide from New York Times on their team: all colours, all sexes - might well unleash again. Have a good weekend.

Always living 'elsewhere': the new intraviduals

The splendidly urbane On Point podcast (from Boston's WBUR) informed me this morning about a new social-issues 'talker' from America, called "Elsewhere, USA: How We Got from the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, BlackBerry Moms, and Economic Anxiety" by a New York sociologist called Dalton Conley. 

For a book that's all about how much the old social opposition of work and leisure is being broken down by, amongst other things, 24-7 connectivity, I'm faintly ashamed to relate the context in which I was listening and taking notes. That is, cradling my iPhone, in an empty coffee bar at 10.00am in the business end of Glasgow, with some decaff and bacon roll by my dilatory side. Undoubtedly performing an act of 'weisure', in one of Conley's unlovelier coinages.

Though there's the suspicion that Conley is angling for Malcolm-Gladwell-guru-status in some of his pronouncements, there's also much food for thought in his spiel. Some choice quotes:

Changes in three areas — the economy, the family and technology — have combined to alter the social world and give birth to this new type of American professional. This new breed — the intravidual — has multiple selves competing for attention within his/her own mind, just as, externally, she or he is bombarded by multiple stimuli simultaneously...

Leisure? The 'good life'? What are those? Work is the central aspect of our lives. We are lucky that it is fulfilling work — work that we will probably continue to do until we are no longer capable — but it is, unlike that of my parents, all-consuming work. There is always an email to answer, a paper or memo to read, and a lecture to give or receive. Success in today's professional world doesn't mean retiring at fifty to play golf in Florida, it means working more and more hours as you move up a towering ladder of economic opportunity (and inequality). Socializing usually revolves around professional colleagues.

Sound familiar to you? The 'intradividual', flexibly responding to a demanding social world, certainly sounds like the 'self-in-and-at-play' that I've been talking about for years. (Deleuze talks about 'dividuals'in his final essays). Yet the second passage ties that player to a universe of endless leads, tasks, items of interest, possibilities of advancement - where the difference between 'friendship' and 'networking', or say 'family time' and 'surfing time', is completely elided. 

The image on the cover of his book - with a family arranged around a table, three with laptops and the other one plugged into her iPod - certainly horrified the admirable On Point host Tom Ashcroft, who pushed Dalton to take a negative line on this networked family (he refused, calling himself a 'social describer' than critic).

Yet I'd have to be honest and confess that I saw that scene regularly over the holiday period - an 11 year-old, a 14 year-old and an 19 year-old each with respective wireless laptops (one regularly purloined from parents), sitting around an old Dutch family table. 

The delightful aspect was that the periods of silent surfing were regularly punctuated by long, giggling interludes of You Tube inspired show-and-tell ('Downfall' mash-ups, lauguhing babies, and Fonejacker were the favourites). Sometimes there would be spontaneous dancing or harmonising to a particular track; and sometimes one would shout up from their browser, having found a particularly cute exhibition or film they wanted us all to go and see. Was this any different, in essence, from a classic family pastimes scene, with the copy, paste and link of their operating systems substituting for the magazines, glue and scissors of old?

To develop Dalton's coinage, we were all intra-viduals easily flipping into being inter-viduals - the fun, laughter and mutual benefit involved in sharing the resources contained in each others' networks. And if the parents are net-friendly (as we are), then this doesn't feel like some alienated gathering of functional schizophrenics, but actually a lovely, rich, memorable time together. 

But this happened in the holiday season - those rare moments when parents and children can hover around each other, untethered from their institutions (whether school, work or portfolio). Doesn't free-time, even in the digital age, still help cement emotional bonds? In the show, Dalton addresses this directly, by noting that in America, at least, the historical fact of mothers working more has not been complemented by the phenomenon of men working less (by comparison, Scandinavian legislation compels the sexes to take equal parental leave). 

He also talks about the psychological self-subversion of current American (These-Islands, too) anxieties over work, which he reckons is impervious to recession or boom. When it's bad times, you'll over-work because you want to hang on to what you've got; when it's good times, you'll over-work because you're comparing yourself with the rapidly advancing Joneses. Either way, you're anxious about not filling every minute with some moment of career-building interactivity. This is a kind of cul-de-sac perspective on human potential (bolstered by behavioural economics - see recent post) which I don't accept. There's more to the human condition that fear of failure, or resentment of success. 

And I still think we need to listen to some real radicals (here and here) on this matter. If the economic health of society now partly depends on our collective willingness to interact, to be creative and expressive with our social tools, don't we need to nourish that "mass innovation" (as Charles Leadbeater calls it) through new types of welfare and regulation? To be an "intervidual", to be a player, is exciting but exhausting: we need a complementary politics of time and care to help us repair and restore ourselves for this active, creative life. Which means sleep, holidays, sabbaticals, shorter-working weeks... you know my litany. 

But always scanning the horizons for other suggestions...