PARENTING THE PLAY-KIDS?
The net is one big playground for kids, a space where they can productively fool around with ideas, identity and media. Should the BBC join in? What can Auntie do for the Playful Generation?
For any modern parent, it's a familiar scene. You stand over your children's shoulders, however covertly, watching as their nimble fingers flutter over the keyboards, nunchucks and touch pads of their digital devices. An Arsenal-themed Powerpoint sits under three separate browser windows – one for chat, one for music sharing, one for Bebo or Facebook.
Someone's sending links of pics for the Powerpoint; fingers flutter back a rebuke, adding their own snippet of information-plus-emoticon. (The mobile intrudes regularly into the exchange, an angry buzzing fly trapped in a tin). And like some kind of domestic water-feature, the sports or cartoon channel shimmers, murmurs or explodes at the other end of the room, the tv merely an ambient input – or waiting to be turned into the full spectacle of a console game.
Yet strip out the flashy and mutable interfaces of these technologies, bracket off the sheer plenitude of material available to the digital child, and what kind of behaviour do we have here? Nothing too far, I'd suggest, from the classic moment of play – that developmental scene present in most human societies that have achieved some distance beyond scarcity or sheer survival, and can thus provide a surplus of toys and materials for their irrepressibly ludic young ones.
Despite the hi-tech means, collages are still being made here, songs are still being sung and learned, teasing and hazing is still being conducted (across the input boxes), intensely imagined worlds of heroism and camaraderie are still being constructed and explored (frame by frame, level by level).
It's not that our children aren't 'digital natives', whose amateur (i.e. passion-driven) literacy and facility with ICT presents such a challenge to less hyper-mediated educators, broadcasters and parents. It's more that play, in the very way it constitutes our basic, complex-mammalian humanity, has itself always been digital – if by 'digital' one means the ability to compose and recompose culture and experience, with absolute combinatorial freedom, using abstractly redefined elements and materials.
The evolutionary urge and animus of play is to serve what the great play scholar Brian Sutton-Smith calls "adaptive potentiation". The very principle of variation that play seems to stand for – all those ways of 'taking reality lightly' that stretch from the crudest jokes to the most elaborate glass-bead games, from dressing-up to situationist art – functions to aid human survival and flourishing.
Our play moments generate hypotheses and possibilities, rehearsing us for the complex business of getting along with other complex, linguistic and self-conscious human animals. But play also delivers an emotional payoff, primarily optimism and hopefulness. We get a surge of positive, coping feelings from the games we construct, enlist others to, and try to succeed at ourselves. We are energised by the simulations we build by ourselves and with others to address some deficiency, or mitigate some challenge, in the real world. This child-like, but not necessarily childish indefatigability (or "neoteny", as the academics have it) is a particularly essential survival trait.
If this is the deep meaning of play in human socio-biology, then what becomes particularly powerful about our digital platforms and technologies is that they actually match, map and mimic the essential variability of play to an unprecedented degree. These children may be such 'digital natives' because they might well be the first generation of humans whose 'playful nature' has been given such powerful and appropriate tools of virtualisation, recombination and communication. Their phantasmagorias of play can now be made into robust worlds and environments, in which the playmates are numerous and global, and the experience can be as physical (eg the Wii console) as it is pixellated.
This will certainly be a generation of children who expect to manage their company's inventories via game consoles, or do their five-way business meetings via smart mobile phones. But their natural embrace of networks-and-digitality may have deeper, perceptual consequences. As the futurist and programmer Marc Pesce said in The Playful World a few years ago,
our children will have a different view of the "interior" nature of the world, seeing it as potentially vital, intelligent, and infinitely transformable. The "dead" world of objects before intelligence and interactivity will not exist for them, and, as they grow to adulthood, they will likely demand that the world remain as pliable as they remember from their youngest days.
A generation demanding that their material and social world remain as pliable, as infusable with imagination and desire, as their childhoods: is this a step-change to be welcomed or feared? It seems, at least, to be a possibility we should be prepared for.
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