Play Journal

Independent Review: 'On the Road to Wikitopia'

My review in the Independent of two excellent (the second of them groundbreaking) books on web culture - We-Think by Charles Leadbeater, and Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky. An extract:

No one could object to sprawling processes of "mass innovation" creating public encyclopedias and seed banks for developing countries, turning cities into giant learning spaces and citizens into journalists. Leadbeater's mantra "we are what we share" could conceivably become "an economy's motive force", particularly if consumerism begins to hit the limits of ecological sustainability hard. A vision of living as an active, creative player-with-others has inspired this particular reviewer for many years.

But, as he reminds us, some areas – such as care services – won't be affected by We-Think: "you cannot change a wet nappy with a text message". Nor harvest food, nor extract minerals, nor generate energy. Although the participatory structure of the web was founded by a singular mix of values ("the academic, the hippie, the peasant and the geek"), there's no guarantee that happy ethos will guide all behaviour within its halls.

Getting a little ragged at 'In the Wild'

Very much enjoyed my time at Channel Four's latest incarnation of In The Wild, their forum series exploring wellbeing, kids education and Web 2.0 - this time as a sideshow to the Scottish Learning Festival in Glasgow. I have to say I enjoyed it mostly for sparring with Carol Craig, the head of the Centre for Confidence and Wellbeing - whose speech clarified a lot of my problems with the hidden normativity, and neo-Puritanism, of the 'happiness' debates. I'm perhaps not the most objective person to report on this, so let me point you to a very useful account of our debate from an edublogger (a new category of blogger, of which Ewan Macintosh is the pertest possible exemplar) called Alan Coady.

Wikinomics review

Here's a review I wrote for the Independent on Don Tapscott's and Anthony Williams' Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. Not very favourable, I have to say. An extract:

There's a weird blindness at the heart of this book, with its gushing celebrations of how corporate collaboration might produce the next Boeing airliner, or a new kitchen wipe. As the peer-to-peer visionary Micheal Bauwens has written, the problem is that we regard what is truly plentiful as scarce (information), and what is truly scarce as plentiful (our finite natural world). There is virtually zero consciousness in Wikinomics of the limits to global corporate activity that our environmental crisis must impose. Indeed, with an award-winning cheesiness, the book opens with an anecdote about a goldmine – revived, of course, through wikinomical means.

As Jeffery Sachs noted in his BBC Reith Lectures this year, mass collaboration through informed networks will be one of the key tools whereby we might heal the planet, environmentally and geopolitically. You would hardly learn of that grand ambition from this comically opportunistic book. The spectre of consultantism hangs over it more oppressively than anything else.

An excellent discussion of my review took place on the mailing list, iDC (Institute of Distributed Creativity), available here.

Review of 'Second Lives'

My Independent review of Second Lives, Tim Guest's journalistic account of a year spent in the Second Life virtual commuity. The book puts reportorial flesh on Edward Castronova's more analytical account of Synthetic Worlds, also reviewed in this blog. An extract:

Even though many millions now have enough resource and leisure to lose ourselves in virtual worlds, we do not seem, by Guest's account, to be particularly developed as players. All the scams, routines and even work-ethics that might compel someone to become a digital escapee get lazily reproduced in Second Life. Mafias extort and coerce, dodgy traders find ways to counterfeit goods, and people labour away at their houses, or trades, or roles, in ways that often seem indistinguishable from "first life".

Guest's honest and intelligent account makes comprehensible a phenomenon which seems, at first glance, like science fiction made reality. But one awaits a "third life" that might become more – more politicised, more rigorous, even more daringly utopian, than the mildly restorative therapy that Second Life has become.

New school based on computer gameplay

Startling news from a Play Ethic friend, Eric Zimmerman of GameLab, that they're getting over a million dollars to start up a new school in New York which uses "gaming and design" as its primary teaching methodology. The full press release is in extended post, and they've also included a piece on NPR by Heather Chaplin (another PE friend, and a co-author of the videogame history Smart Bomb.) Here's an exciting chunk of ludological pedagogy for ya:

“We are conceiving the school as a dynamic learning system that takes its cues from the way games are designed, shared and played,” said Katie Salen,Executive Director of the Gamelab Institute of Play. “All players in the school – teachers, students,parents and administrators – will be empowered to innovate using 21st century literacies that are native to games and design. This means learning to think about the   world as a set of in interconnected systems that can be affected or changed through action and choice, the ability to navigate complex information networks, the power to build worlds and tell stories, to see collaboration in competition, and communicate across diverse social spaces. It means that students and teachers will engage in their own learning in powerful ways.”

Sachs, Gore and 'networked democracy'

Update 18 May: Just seen two links that back up my question to Jeffrey Sachs at the BBC Reith Lecture (see extended post below) on whether we're defending the open structure of the internet as robustly as we should be

First, Al Gore on 'networked democracy' and its potential to revitalise the American republic:

The Internet has the potential to revitalize the role played by the people in our constitutional framework. It has extremely low entry barriers for individuals. It is the most interactive medium in history and the one with the greatest potential for connecting individuals to one another and to a universe of knowledge. It's a platform for pursuing the truth, and the decentralized creation and distribution of ideas, in the same way that markets are a decentralized mechanism for the creation and distribution of goods and services. It's a platform, in other words, for reason.

But the Internet must be developed and protected, in the same way we develop and protect markets—through the establishment of fair rules of engagement and the exercise of the rule of law. The same ferocity that our Founders devoted to protect the freedom and independence of the press is now appropriate for our defense of the freedom of the Internet.

The stakes are the same: the survival of our Republic. We must ensure that the Internet remains open and accessible to all citizens without any limitation on the ability of individuals to choose the content they wish regardless of the Internet service provider they use to connect to the Web. We cannot take this future for granted. We must be prepared to fight for it, because of the threat of corporate consolidation and control over the Internet marketplace of ideas.

And secondly, the BBC on how 'global net censorship is growing'

The study of thousands of websites across 120 Internet Service Providers found 25 of 41 countries surveyed showed evidence of content filtering. Websites and services such as Skype and Google Maps were blocked, it said.

Such "state-mandated net filtering" was only being carried out in "a couple" of states in 2002, one researcher said. "In five years we have gone from a couple of states doing state-mandated net filtering to 25," said John Palfrey, at Harvard Law School.

Wil Wright demonstrates Spore

A video clip from the New Yorker 2012 futures conference, with Will Wright lecturing on Spore. What can I say? Essential viewing (and the whole conference is wonderful fare).

Rachel O'Connell from Bebo, at Channel Four's In the Wild conference

            Taken from the trusty NokiaN70 in the gallery, but a really interesting speech from Rachel O'Connell, Bebo's Safety Officer at Channel Four's In the Wild Conference on 10th May (in which I spoke, on the topic of informal learning - more on that later). She outlines their new service Bebo Be One, providing civic, activist, enterprise and well-being services for their users. We spoke after her talk, and she really "got" the Play Ethic perspective.

Throwing the Net round global poverty

The BBC's Reith Lectures started this morning, with development economist Jeffrey Sachs describing a world 'bursting at the seams'. I was privileged to be asked to be a lead questioner in the last lecture, at Edinburgh. I've written a Guardian Comment is Free column this morning, with my reactions to the lecture, and some further thoughts on how Sachs' anti-poverty agenda could be made more persuasive to Western audiences. I close with an appeal to developers and moguls in the Web 2.0 era: what are the 'life-saving' apps (rather than 'killer' apps) they could devise that would make participation and commitment to Sachs' (and others') world-healing agenda a natural part of our 'play with networks'?

Any ideas yourself, folks? (There have already been a few useful exchanges on the CiF comment pages). As a minor addendum, I really like Becky Hogge's column in Open Democracy today, which asks whether we need to solidify the value-base that underlies the open-source and participatory web:

What most agree on, though, is that the evidence in support of open standards and a generative, bottom-up internet - one that is the expression of the creative powers of the global community - is justification enough for a struggle for internet freedom. Yet...some underlying values would certainly not go amiss. As the validity of this new way of doing things asserts itself, I feel for the first time that the absence of an obvious, shared set of values might be a barrier to progress.

Play Ethics @ Channel Four

Heads up for an interesting event I'm appearing at next month, called In The Wild: Well being, the Web and the future of Education, on 10 May 2007, organised by Channel Four Education. Here's the blurb:

... A unique event which brings together young people , educators, policy makers, and representatives from the digital and broadcast media worlds into a conversation about the challenges and dilemmas facing those growing up in the UK today. In the Wild will explore some of the defining issues facing young people as make the transition to adulthood.

Featuring a mix of presentations and provocations from some leading edge thinkers and practitioners, panel discussions and facilitated conversations this event will explore among other topics:

Get Happy! - responding to the UNICEF report on children’s well being   

In the Wild – remagicalising the world through informal learning;

Living Online – work, rest and play with the Web generation

Alive and Kicking! – How schools are responding to the challenges of the ‘innovation century’