The Play Ethic

Parenting the Play-Kids? A "play ethic" for the BBC

This is a paper for the BBC's R&D department called "Parenting the Play-Kids?", which is my suggestion of what a "play ethic for the BBC" might be (I've already made a stab at this a few years ago). It's triggered by some academic research the Corporation did on youth engagement with their online services (the papers are hotlinked in the essay below). The final "newspaper" (available here as PDF) also has some splendid contributions from online experts like Bill Thompson and Stephen Heppell (you can also e-mail request a physical copy). As ever, all comments welcomed below.

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.

Blogging and "informationalism" - interview with Murray Newlands

I did quite a useful interview with Murray Newlands, the social media consultant, for his blog the other month - now available here. We cover my long history with blogging - that's micro-, macro- and meso-blogging - and how that fits with my general analysis of culture, economy and technology as expressed in the Play Ethic book. An exchange:

Where do you see growth in the blogging field?

Again, I think micro-blogging (a la Facebook and Twitter), particularly conducted through rich portable media devices like the iPhone, has taken some of the burden off traditional web-based blogs to be these instantaneous places of self-expression. For me, blogs are now an opportunity for you to step back a little from the cybernetic loop we can so easily get caught up in with mobile, locational and real-time media. However I think that micro-blogging can itself develop a little more, up and away from the “140″ character limitation. My presentation at the Media140 conference in London suggested that a ‘meso-blogging’ might be possible. (Which allows for my kinda blogging to be ‘macro-blogging’, I suppose). If we’re not just reading newspapers on street corners, but now producing news on street corners, are the devices, networks and platforms were using really up to the task yet? I’m using and trying out everything in this field (AudioBoo my favourite), but I still think there are slightly richer on-the-move blogging experiences to be had than the ones afforded by a telecom engineer’s casual addition to the design of his device…

What new ideas are advertisers coming up with to take advantage of new trends?

As Clay Shirky says, we’re in the space between the death of the bad old things and the birth of the good new things - meaning that online advertising is not yet an complete replacement for the kinds of ads that a collapsing old media used to serve up. And perhaps they never will be. I wonder whether the whole relationship between someone who makes a product or service that they think might have users or consumers, and the deeply demanding conversations and transparencies that characterise online behaviour, means that advertising will have to completely rethink its function - and by association, the manufacturers and service providers themselves. Add to that recession and eco-crisis, and it may be that online advertising and its clients will have to become part of the toolbox of living sustainably. lightly and well - clearly seen to be adding to the solution, not wasting and problematising our precious time.

Social Media and Informationalism blogger and author of The Play Ethic, Pat Kane an Interview

The internet as factory and playground (1): the travails of 'fan labour'

This is the first contribution I've made to a fascinating group of thinkers and activists called the Institute for Distributed Creativity (iDC), whose organiser Trebor Scholz is organising a conference in New York in November on 'Digital Labor: the internet as factory and playground', which I hope to attend. It's a fertile space, generating much thought and insight, so I'm going to share my postings here. (Apologies in advance - it's an academic space, so Specialized Jargon Will Be Deployed Occasionally). 

THE TRAVAILS OF FAN LABOR*

In terms of a debate about whether users' interactivity with net platforms is a form of exploitation of labor (in the Marxist sense), I'm aware that I might be living a somewhat schizophrenic life. In one domain, I'm a working musician who is part of a UK "legacy" act from the 80's, Hue And Cry. Since our relaunch in late 2008, our strategy has been to use the enthusiasm of online fandom to reanimate our "brand", by using flexible and media-rich social networks (particularly Ning) to capture the passions raised both by our new music, our live performance, and other traditional outlets of media exposure (radio, TV, press).

 In these sites – particularly the Music Club- we actively encourage and facilitate all kinds of 'fan labor' (cultural note: our biggest hit was called "Labour of Love" in 1987, more inspired by Gramsci than Bateson). This can include: cam-phone audio-visual recording from gigs; giving fans the opportunity to suggest and vote on songs they'd like us to perform and record; allowing fans to upload their own covers of our songs. 

But this doesn't include a lot of emergent, spontaneous activity that comes from the users' own ability to generate sub-networks and forums of their own, within the Hue And Cry Music Club site. We don't charge subscription fees to the site (like many other bands), and we have a programme of regular updates of audio-visual content produced by my musical partner and I – again, freely streamed. 

There's much to say about this experience – which I hope to share at the NY conference in November. But in terms of kicking off this debate, the core point might be that our presumption has been that we're dealing with a radically counter-commercial audience and environment – one in which digital networked distribution of music has driven its price point to effectively zero, and in which that music has almost become a kind of 'community currency'. By that I mean a system of exchange whose value accumulation is fan enthusiasm and commitment, rather than straightforward monetary rent from IP-identified saleable objects. (Although as Spotify, Last.fm and other outfits show, a licensing system may be a possible recommodifier of music consuming habits, though with the pressure of 'free' keeping overall revenue much lower than the heydays of CD sales). 

So in terms of making a living, we have fallen upon the maxim "use what is ubiquitous to drive people to what is scarce" – ie use the ubiquity and tending-towards-free circulation of digital content to raise awareness about those real-world moments of spatio-temporal enclosure (the gig, the meet'n'greet, the music workshop) whose boundaries can be controlled, and thus commodified. (Our refinement on that is to create our own 'ubiquitous' commons of Hue And Cry music within the Music Club – 'reterritorialising', to no doubt misuse Deleuze, the deterritorialised flows of digital culture).

It's not that we don't try to sell recordings anymore – we do, and we are doing so, though the objects these recordings are attached to are way beyond the old CD, and are more lifestyle/luxury products with music inserted, an extension of our "brand" across non-musical physical objects. But our working presumption is that recorded music, because of digitisation, networks and their innovations, is always under a huge gravitational force dragging it towards free usage.

And just to be clear, I come at the question of what value is being realised by commercial platform owners by the free labor of users from a small-business perspective – as artists seeking some kind of income from our endeavours and enterprises. We are rights-holders in our own small company, who seek to use non-commercial, part-commercial (the usual social platforms) and fully-commercial (ie larger distributors and syndicators) networks to promote our music, both recorded and performed.

Commercially, I should be agnostic-ironic about what networks are best for that purpose. But civically, I'm a supporter of the 'innovation commons' of the Net a la Lessig, and would resist any attempt to tamper with the basic end-to-end architecture of the Web (ie, to create tiers of net access with protocols restricted, for whatever reason). 

I guess I have to stake out my petit-bourgeois, mixed-economy, social-democrat traders' identity at the beginning. And what I'm looking for from a conference/discussion on 'the internet and playground and factory' is a new political economy of the Net that can find a place for creative and sustainable cultural enterprise, within this complex landscape (as Yochai Benkler says in the Wealth of Networks) of market, state and 'sharing' economies. 

I feel that the answers may lie as much in welfare and social policy. That is, what kind of social provisions and support can be made for a 'general intellect' now active throughout society, as the Italian Marxists say? Does a four day week or a citizens' income more effectively answer our anxieties about our affective and cognitive 'lives' pouring into these networks, than a discourse about how our free labor benefits Google's bottom line?

*with concessions to the American linguistic imperium

Pat Kane's keynote at The Economist's 'Opportunity in Adversity' Conference, London, June 2

Welcome to all those who heard my presentation at the Economist's Opportunity in Adversity conference today, on 'The Play Ethic'. The slides are available below for watching and download. If you've any questions or further enquiries, or you'd like me to speak at your organisation about play, please contact me on any of the email or twitter links on the top right column of this site. 

best, pat kane

The Play Ethic: lessons from play in an adverse economic climate

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Pat Kane keynote at Media140: the challenge of Twitter to News Media

Update: two great precis of my presentation at the first Media 140 conference in London yesterday, from The Guardian and Journalism.co.uk. Media140 have also posted up a video too:

Pat Kane - Media140 Keynote - 20th May 2009 from media140 on Vimeo.

The challenge of "140" to News Media

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A Welfare System For Players (1): The Spirit of Informationalism

A blog about a "play ethic" can't always be about favourite bands, fun software and festive practices throughout the world. I wasn't directly inspired to write the Play Ethic book by cavorting rejuveniles in gaily-coloured clothes (though there's enough of that in the music business), but by a line from the Catalonian sociologist Manuel Castells.

Castells asked: If the "work ethic" could be described (by Max Weber) as the "spirit of capitalism", what might the "spirit of informationalism" be? In the late 90's I thought I knew what "informationalism" was. It wasn't just a "knowledge economy": after all, the Roman Empire was a knowledge economy, from its sanitation strategies to its legal code. Informationalism meant a social order that was deeply shaped by computer networks – and was thus a very flexible, unpredictable and mobile society indeed.

It struck me that the answer to Castells question was that the spirit of informationalism was obviously a "play ethic". If the "work ethic" made industrial workers duteous, time-keeping, diligent and self-disciplined, a "play ethic" would just as effectively shape informational workers to fit their system. That is, it would make them resourceful, able to shift tasks and learn new skills, willing to deploy their imaginations to solve problems in their organisations.

As writers like Richard Sennett have been mordantly pointing out for years, those were the psychological habits demanded by the new capitalism – demands not just driven by computers and networks in themselves, of course, but by the new pressures of global competition that they enabled. In his view, these habits resulted in the very "corrosion of character" itself. A strong character, according to Sennett, was composed from those traditions and practices that people derived from apply themselves to their trade or occupation. The new capitalism literally tore those old occupational identities to shreds, and then expected people to compose and recompose themselves from the fragments.

Yet I always resisted the idea (also promoted by critics like Zygmunt Bauman) that such 'players' were just the bright-eyed, endlessly malleable jack-rabbits of super-capitalism. This scepticism almost certainly came from my experience as a musician. There's no shortage of lifestyle and career flexibility in that realm. But within and around your art, you were free to make critical statements about politics and society – statements that would surely not be encouraged in any usual market-facing organisation, where your smarts and adaptability tend to be harnessed to serve "world-class competitveness", first and foremost.

When I discovered hacker communities (primarily by way of Pekka Himanen's The Hacker Ethic), I found some kindred spirits. Hackers were as joyfully committed as musicians to their symbolic craft (making code rather than music, though of course both are notation in some way). And they were even better at deriving an ethics and politics from their practice.

Why was I interested in the politics of such players? Partly because the "work ethic" has always implied its own politics: from Paul's biblical injunction in Thessalonians that "them who shall not work, shall not eat" all the way up to the welfare-for-work proposals of New Labour and New Democrat governments in the 90's. 

The "dignity of labour" didn't depend on what that job was, or to what degree it expressed the talents, aspirations or desires of the worker, but mostly on the fact that they were willing to submit themselves to work – something that proved their "character", in Sennett's sense. And as long as everyone else agreed to work under these conditions, you could presume a kind of solidarity-in-privation: together we're all alienated, or at least relatively disatissfied, with what we're doing with our waking lives.

There were two compensations for this lack of essential autonomy over your productive life. On one side there were wages-for-consumption – money to buy the weekend/holiday hedonism of leisure and lifestyle. On the other side, at least in Europe, there was a welfare state which promised to repair you if you broke under the strain of labour (health), skill and re-skill you for the relevant slots in the labour market (education), and ensure you warmth and shelter in any eventuality (public sector housing).

The story of how that political arrangement fell apart (partly because of all those wider and deeper changes that Castells gathers under the title of 'informationalism', partly due to internal tensions – between the contrary pulls of consumer hedonism and producer self-discipline, for example) would take me into another thousand words.

But what I've always wondered is whether a "play ethic" – if it ever became dominant in a society - could generate its own political arrangements, its own social compensations, to match those of the work ethic. What would a welfare state be like that could support (or in the old Marxist sense, "reproduce") the intrinsically flexible, necessarily imaginative, endlessly communicative lives and selves demanded by our current model of capitalism? And if that ever came to be, how transformed would capitalism be as a result?

Over the next few days, I'm going to explore some notions floating around my various networks at the moment that might make up a "A Welfare System for Players". Heaven knows, I'm no social policy expert! But as a member of the precarious class of players, I have a direct interest in what reforms could be implemented. All comments and forwardings, of course, entirely welcomed.

Taking Reality Lightly: the challenge of play to metrics of creativity

I had a deeply stimulating session with the academics at Cambridge University's CRASSH initiative the other day, discussing the fascinating topic of how much research in the arts, humanities and social sciences can really transfer over to more commercial, creative-industry areas. 

As someone who's tried to smuggle all kinds of high-theory into his pop-song lyrics for years now - even if only metaphorically (see paper in extended entry bellow) - I had quite a lot to say about this.

My thanks to Lee Wilson and James Leach, the organiser and chair of the event. The presentation below isn't exactly written according to the most disciplined scholarly standards, but I did avail myself of the university context and cavorted freely and happily in the fields of theory... So casual readers of play, be warned. (And don't worry: the Thorpe Park post is coming soon.)

Alter-globalist, meet benign capitalist: the encompassing attractions of "creative play"

My journey back to Scotland had me furiously ripping articles out of today's Guardian, in a chain of play-ethical topics I just couldn't ignore. Forgive the cognitive leaps, they were irresistible...

Carnivals against banksterism

My first example is Katherine Ainger's op-ed on how the anticapitalist movement of ten years ago is gearing up for a comeback, timed to the coming G20 conference in London. It reminded me of some of my political aspirations in the Play Ethic book (which I'm re-reading with a macabre interest at the moment). I'd hoped that between the 'work ethic' espoused by orthodox, growth-oriented government and companies, and the 'protest ethic' coming from the streets and the South, a 'play ethic' could perhaps be a mediating argument - translating the idealism and utopianism of the latter into new institutions and policies for the former.

It didn't look like anything like that was happening in 2003-2004. But if the ethical and civic vigour of the social software movement in the UK and the US is anything to go by (with Obama's election, if not quite his government so far, the best example of their effectiveness), it looks like those connecting tissues are being formed now - tissues partly made up of the playing, gaming and enterprising nature of net-enabled activism. And not just technological networks, but societal networks too.

Ainger's piece also reminded me of my book's quotation of anarchist David Graeber, who I've mentioned in a recent post (scroll to bottom). Here's Ainger's relevant and fascinating words:

The solutions the "alter-global" networks have developed offer a way out that is based on whole systems thinking. Fundamental to this vision is an economy that meets the needs of everyone on a planet of finite resources.

Which is why the climate camp in the city, with its slogan "Because nature doesn't do bailouts", is one of the most interesting of all the movements coalescing in London next week. It's a potent mix of seasoned anti-globalisation activists who are skilled in creative direct action and a new generation that is energised and refreshingly undogmatic. 

The camp has taken a key component of the globalisation movement - the temporary autonomous zones of street parties and convergence centres liberated in cities during summit protests - to a new level, creating a transformational space which prefigures the world they want, featuring everything from wind turbines and composted waste to decentralised decision-making and creative play.

There's no doubt that 'reclaiming the streets', in a playful, carnivalesque and collaborative spirit, is a powerful experience - both for participants and the onlookers it's intended to challenge.¹ And if a play-ethical perspective isn't open to new forms of democratic creativity, it's isn't worth the invocation. As ever, one hopes that it's Ainger's idealism that characterises the protest. And that the usual marginals out for a bit of cathartic urban confrontation or destruction get reined in by her more "seasoned" activists. 

Doing well by playing well: Lego 

The other piece in today's Guardian that talks about play's power and potential is a lovingly written cover piece by Jon Henley on Lego - pegged to the information that the Danish company is doing especially well in the teeth of this recession, with its sales up 51% in the UK last year.

 

With the creative passions of the alter-globalisation protestors in mind, it's intriguing to read this account of this thoroughly Scandinavian company (who regularly top reputation indexes for corporations), and their seemingly universally beloved product. 

Ainger might talk about 'whole systems thinking' (this kind, I guess). The "Lego System of Play" was introduced in 1955, and Henley relates lots of kindly tales about the founder, Ole Kirk Christiansen, compelling his son to repaint toy ducks because he'd put on only two layers than three, or citing the company slogan about quality control for children's toys Det beste er ikke for godt (Not even the best is good enough). And though it's true that Lego did catch some of the brand intoxication of the 90's - expanding into theme parks, movies, clothes, software, thinking they could be as sexy as Apple - they've since returned to their core business of making toys. 

At the moment, Lego's next new frontiers are fusing virtual and physical game-play ("imagine if kids were telling their playmates, 'Hey, guess what - if you clip a set of shoulder pads onto this guy, he gets three times as many strength points online!' That's the holy grail"), and moving into the world of board-games (Lego Ludo, anyone?). There doesn't seem to be much to object to a company whose aim is to make a toy that gives such a sense of imaginative mastery to children (and as Henley writes, quite a few obsessed adults).

Even if you go online to find any alter-globalisation dirt on the company, there seems to be very little. I found this extensive response to a parent's worry in the company's forum pages, about the extent to which Lego were using sweat-labour in China to make their toys (very little, it seems). And in a toy business conference on safety I spoke at last year, the company's head Jorgen Vig Knudstorp was clearly the poster-boy for an industry which had been badly fouling its own nest, with lax safety and labour-standard practices in the far East.

It's not much of a "full disclosure" to say that I've spoken at Lego conferences, collaborated with their Serious Play consultancy, have met their CEO a few times now, and generally approve of them and their works. But if we're also thinking of a playful critique of current capitalism, it is interesting to consider how much Lego, even as a capitalist multinational, is a product of a certain Scandinavian sensibility. One in which a commercial enterprise regards the pro-development, pro-community values of its products as being its crucial competitive advantage - with these values reinforced by the company's strong base in its place of origin. (Usmir Haque's recent lectures on Constructive Capitalism are relevant here). 

Yes, there are always questions to ask about any company who seeks to extract value from children (or their parents' wallets). Some of their lines still seem pretty badly gendered (there's slashing Bionicles for certain boys, and Belville horse farms for certain girls - though they have reestablished the unisex fire-stations of old. And Spongebob Squarepants' "Good Neighbours at Bikini Bottom" looks, frankly, covetable by children of all ages). 

But I'd like to know from the net-rades in the coming G20 Climate Camp whether they have a positive vision of any company that might fit their "alter-globalising" criteria. (Not to dismiss their critique of existing institutions - but it would be interesting to know). Would Lego fit the bill?

Update: From a few Google searches, I have a troubled answer. It seems the climate campers have indeed used "creative play" to create a "transformational space" - in Legoland, Windsor (see pic at the top, and video below). 

Originally I thought the protestors had constructed the whole thing. But having looked at it closely, Legoland has clearly already built a smoking nuclear power plant (with evident sponsorship from the not-very-well-behaved energy company E-On). The Climate Campers have climbed in wearing company shirts, attached a Lego-sized protest banner, and placed Lego-sized protestors on its polluting rim... 

Now, an activism that makes you broadly smile can't be entirely off the mark. If it makes Lego think harder about their environmental associations, it was definitely worthwhile. And an example of the necessary tensions that need to exist between Ainger's playful radicals, and even the most ethically-playful organisations. We live in inescapably interesting times...

 

NOTES

¹ And we shouldn't forget that they were having their effects. Some dates and places you'll never forget: 8.30am, Sept 11th, 2001, Glasgow. Buying my Financial Times and looking forward to reading its four-part series on "the anti-globalization" movement. "It is wide in its tactics and ambitions, violent and revolutionary on the edges, peaceful and reformist in the main. It rushes in often contradictory directions, anti-corporate and entrepreneurial, anarchistic and nostalgic, technophobe and futuristic, revolutionary and conservative all at the same time", wrote a clearly enamoured James Harding (now editor of The Times). And then, at 8.46am in New York, a screaming came across the sky...

The 'green work ethic'? A player's (slightly disgruntled) thoughts

As unemployment heads for 3 million in the UK, I've found a rash of newspaper features about the meaning of work - most of them citing the pop philosopher Alain De Botton's new book, The Pleasures And Sorrows of Work. The observation they share is how historically specific the idea of a 'work ethic' actually is – in which work is not just the means whereby one resources one's life, but also provides us with meaning and status. 

But I'm wondering whether this ethos is about to see a bit of a revival, in this new moment of crisis - and on whose terms it will revive.

In the Sunday Herald, DeBotton ties the work ethic to the European Enlightenment - and notes that the idea of the 'nobility of labour' emerged there at the same time as the idea of 'a marriage of love' (rather than of financial or procreative convenience):

We are the heirs of these two very ambitious beliefs: that you can be in love and married, and in a job and having a good time. It has become as impossible for us to think that you could be out of work and happy as it had once seemed impossible for Aristotle to think that you could be employed and human.

Peter Conrad in the Observer also cites the Greek disdain for work: 

The 12 labours of Hercules, which include cleaning mucky stables, a job fit for desperate members of the underclass, were tasks imposed by the gods to demean the uppity hero. This lofty classical attitude took for granted the existence of slaves, who were the equivalent of our labour-saving gadgets - not people but appliances to be worked to death and then thrown away.

Much to chew on here, including this: Advocates of play have to grapple with the elitist, even aristocratic overtones of many self-consciously 'playful' or 'leisured' cultures of the past. This has the logic of evolution behind it. Play thrives for complex mammals in zones where scarcity or danger is held well distant from daily life. And in terms of adult play, beyond its compulsiveness in youth, it's only been aristocracies and elites who have had (or commanded to themselves) the resources to enable that. The servant class is usually presumed.

But I've always questioned myself: do contemporary play advocates sometimes substitute automation and networks for slaves and homesteads? I was noticing this morning, while re-reading my Play Ethic book, that so much of its argument depends on an assumption that Westerners already live in an environment of technology-and-science-enabled plenitude. The target of much of my critique is against the Puritan (and Enlightenment) 'work ethic': after William Blake, I claim in the book that the work ethic is a 'mind-forg'd manacle' which ties us to hierarchy and conformity in overly disciplinary organisations. 

A 'play ethic' might allow us to think anew about our social order, if we presumed (as a player does) that our true 'human nature' loves self-expression, self-realisation and invention more than the dullness of routine. Applying a play ethic might help us to identify jobs, occupations and services that we don't really need to do, and imagine and forge new purposes and practices that better express our creative human nature. 

All this presumes a society of excess resources - where productive technology gives us enough material surplus to be able to make those choices. This is one of the oldest "modern" stories. For 150 years, one strand of the labour movement has argued that productivity gains should result in shorter working weeks for constant wages. This fulfills Marx's idea (and socialism's idea generally) that humans come into their own when they move beyond the 'realm of necessity'. And what did the Left imagine those workers would do with their 'realm of freedom'? Sometimes that's a horrific answer. I prefer the Adolf Loos quote: "The difference between myself and a Bolshevik is that I want to turn everyone into an aristocrat whereas he wants to turn everyone into a proletarian."

Yet are we coming to the end an era where we blithely assume we have, literally, enough resources to play with? Not just in terms of the inevitable contractions and expansions of capitalism, but in terms of the looming horizon of ecological crisis? 

The Next Journalism (2): the citizen as co-journalist, & the joy of reading on street corners

Yesterday I sat down to ingest a pile of recent analyses of the imminent 'end of the newspaper' (see list at the bottom of this post). As I said in my Monday post, apart from my night job, I'm an ex-editor and occasional journalist; and I wanted to take a day or two to get my head round the fate of my old business. It's been clarifying for me - hope it's useful for you.

Here's the core points:

1) How particular the old, 20th century business model was. Paul Starr's calm and comprehensive piece in the New Republic makes it clear that when a commercial newspaper provided a 'public good' - for example, accurate and investigative reportage on the doings of those with power and money, or foreign reporting, or detailed arts coverage - it could do so because it had a strong claim on the majority of classified ads in its locality. Because of this, newspapers couldn't be dominanted by one or a small group of advertisers, which allowed them the freedom to fund the best journalistic principles - for muck-raking, "comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable". The coverprice was only ever one element in the financial mix that supported the journalistic enterprise. (Of course, newspapers could also be run by avaricious and ideologically-explicit moguls or corporation, salting away their high margins. But the papers' stranglehold on a certain kind of advertising revenue meant that the possbility of resourcing 'responsible journalism' was always there).

Nowadays the internet (as well as the rest of our exploding media-verse) is a much more powerful intermediary between advertisers and consumers than the old newspaper: the Web provides both more targeted marketing (Google), and extremely low-cost marketing (Craiglist). As the ad dollars leave the newspaper, its editorial latitude tightens.

As Clay's piece says, some newspapers had seen the writing on the wall for ages. Ten years ago I recall my own past papers in Scotland (the Herald) frantically setting up as many online classified ad-sites as they could, yet weirdly not plastering them with the paper's brand (eg, S1Jobs). Yet the digital tsunami is now sweeping away many of those who haven't managed to set up online intermediaries that could be as effective to their localities as Google, or E-Bay, or Craigslist. Add recession to this picture, and this explains the implosion of newspaper titles in the US and UK.

2) Company structure is still so important. Too many of these articles cite the Guardian Media Group as a possible model to follow - not just for their enthusiastic, long-term embrace of digital media, but also because of their status as a trust (the Scott Trust), which insulates them from shareholder-driven, quarterly-report-style performance pressures. Yet as we all know, the Guardian and Observer are loss-making operations, which get cross-subsidized from other GMG media properties like tv production, local radio and notably Auto-Trader, a long-standing 'intermediary' for buyers and sellers in the UK. (See this Guardian Media Group mogul's speech for how it all hangs together).

Certainly in the Scottish context which I know best, the large corporate owners who have recently taken over the major quality titles - Gannett and Thompson Press - are pushing for very high returns-on-investment, which has resulted in the usual reductions in staff, pagination and editorial reach of the product. (BTW, here's a suggestion for an online-savvy plan to rescue the quality Scottish titles). Yes, the internet has caused an irreversible upheaval in how people get and want their information. But it's difficult not to look at the persistent rapacity of commercial owners - who in the past, because of their advertising monopolies, enjoyed amazing profit margins of up to 30%, yet who hardly returned much of that as "R&D" for the future of journalism - as part of the cause of the current fragility of newspapers.

3) It's not clear how much people value news anymore. Paul Starr cites some interesting research into the impact of cable and satellite channels on news values. They seem to have caused a real polarisation - with some audiences rushing away from news altogether, into the arms of permanent entertainment; and some rushing towards the constant streams of dedicated news channels. As Starr puts it, we are increasingly dividing into "news-dropouts" and "news-junkies". What the professor laments in this scenario is the possible loss of the "general newspaper reader" - someone who buys their half-decent paper, reading (or at least noticing) some news about a world disaster or local corruption, as they make their way to the sports, lifestyle or jobs/property pages. With the death of the traditionally-balanced and inclusive paper, warns Starr, we get a potentially un-democratic gulf between the under-informed and the over-informed.

In response, Yochai Benkler (and supportively, Steven Johnson and Clay Shirky) point out that as old journalist institutions totter and fall, new ones are beginning to appear - ones that will be able to fulfill the "servicing of the public good" that rested on the largesse of the old ad-supported, locally-monopolistic city paper.

We should be conscious, says Benkler, that this is a shift from an industrial to a networked model of news production - from one where an enterprise dominates its market place making relatively stable revenues, to one which embraces "market and non-market, large scale and small, for profit and non-profit, organized and individual ways" of reporting news. A model which, by implication, brings in considerably less money overall. (Benkler is known for his big social theory which posits a third political economy of sharing, revealed by the internet, which we must now add to market and state economies)

Benkler has a list of "next-journalism" examples to watch for. Take what he calls "small-scale commercial media". These are net enteprises (currently mostly blogs) that have ascended the power-law curve of attention like Talking Points Memo, and use their slowly building online ad revenue to fund a small but intensely muck-raking and focussed journalistic staff. Is this journalism as it was - just as well-paid, with similar conditions and benefits? Probably not. But if you want to do what you'd regard (coming out of journalism school) as "proper journalism", this might be a new (if idealistic) haven.

Starr also calls out to philanthropists, asking them to put some of their civically-minded money into online investigative operations - Propublica being the obvious poster-child for this. I bet this gets some response on both sides of the pond. And it was fascinating to read recently that $5 billion of an endowment would ensure the perpetual running of the New York Times's newsroom, currently costing $200 milllion a year. (For newsrooms costing less, you could obviously scale it down). Isn't this an open-goal for our remaining tech-plutocrats? Will we see the new dot-com Hearsts fund their first serious paper in this way?

Another development Benkler urges us to note are the "new, volunteer-driven party presses" - like Daily Kos or Huffington Post on the American liberal left, and Town Hall and Drudge Report on the right. (The UK equivalents might be ConservativeHome, or Lenin's Tomb.) These sites will certainly dig up scandalous truffles on their ideological opponents - and cumulatively, that contrarian vigour will to some degree supplant what the political correspondants on newspapers used to do. Of course, this implies a net-era readership that is willing to actively sift through and assess all this flak, in order to get to the facts - rather than, as before, implicitly accepting the judiciousness of the political journalist.

The most fascinating signs of the future comes from what Benkler calls "newly effective nonprofits" - examples like the Sunlight Foundation, who use collaborative techniques to keep tabs on corruption and nest-feathering in American politics, using social-software tools to burrow through, and see patterns in, available public information. (The various projects coming out from MySociety in the UK are a parallel).

As Shirky has often asserted, this kind of 'many-eyes-solve-all-bugs' process might be, at least, a useful complement to the old Sunday Times 'Insight' ideal of investigative reporting - and perhaps, at best, a new model for collective vigilance over politicians and moguls. It makes me wonder whether there's a sweet spot here for newspaper operations that can hold their nerve in this crisis.  Could they design their investigations in an open-source, Wikipedian way, inviting mass participation in the process, and as a result showing advertisers that there can be online enthusiasm for this kind of editorial? At the very least, it strikes me that journalists need to be talking to code jockeys and hackers a lot more, whether as part of their newspaper's internal strategy or not. Maybe the current spates of layoffs will result in some interesting mid-morning coffee conversations...

Starr's nostalgia for the newspaper as 'microcosm of the world' may persist with the bigger titles - the Guardian's, New York Times's and Die Zeit's that people will turn to for synoptic and highly-intelligent overviews of the world. And Starr articulates a real anxiety about the health of our democracies - with the demise of local journalists, who will hold local power to account? But it seems clear that what's coming to replace that is going to be a sprawling, messy but fertile new eco-system - involving a mix of underemployed journalists, new media and a wider citizen participation in the composition of what we regard as news. (Unless journalists go over to the 'dark side' of PR - where wages and conditions may match what's left behind, but at what ethical cost?)

4) There might be a solution in device-meets-retail. But there's probably not much time left on that one. Shirky makes a great point about the difference between an iTunes for news (Walter Issacson's pitch) and an iTunes for music - which is that when people buy an Arcade Fire track (or hey! a Hue And Cry track!), they want to listen to it over and over again. It's unlikely people would do that for a news article - it's much more "fungible" than music. (And which makes the argument for e-books, by comparison, pretty strong).