Play Journal

Via Positiva: the Play Ethic in Croatia

Ridiculously long time not blogging on the Play Journal, I agree, but have been dealing with family illness (all well now), paradigm revolution in the music business, constitutional evolution in Scotland... But with some luck, I'm back.

And to kick off, an interview conducted with the Croatian online journal Via Positiva - nothing new, but I find that answering familiar questions allows me to update the Play Ethic without too much labour...

Pat Kane Interview with Via Positiva, January 2008

1) What is the play ethic? Why do we need it? Why should we leave the work ethic behind?

The Play Ethic is what truly supersedes the Work Ethic, and is more relevant to our times than the Leisure Ethic. The Work Ethic was a story about self-discipline and self-denial that the first age of industrial capitalism needed its workers to believe in (basically to watch the clock and accept their place in the factory system). The Leisure Ethic (what we used to know as the 'leisure society') was a mid-to-late 20th century story about the benefits of affluence - that work would be reduced to a minimum by technology and automation, and that we would have to get skilled at recreation, relaxation, self-improvement. The Play Ethic comes after the internet, and globalisation, and is a story about how to live (or try and live) a coherent life in a dynamic, unstable and emergent world. We have an innate resource by which we can do this - our formative experience as players, that burst of enthusiasm and experimentation that forges the adults we become. We need to recover the power of play in our lives, to be capable for this new world.

New Labour's plan for children's play

Extremely positive announcement by the Westminster Labour government on a new "Children's Plan", in which the provision of play spaces and the validation of their exuberance and explorations is front and centre. The BBC news report quotes the relevant minister, Ed Balls (appropriately enough) as saying that "children should be both seen and heard", and is promising to:

- build play spaces for "tweenagers" (aged eight-13) with £225m to build or upgrade 3,500 community playgrounds
- put an end to "no ball games" culture - bringing importance of play into public spaces and planning
- provide £160m for positive activities for young people in sport, drama and art

"We want to move away from the 'No Ball Games' culture of the past so that public spaces in residential areas are more child friendly," says the plan. Great news for play advocates - now the question is, will they ever address the right to play for adults too...

Tim Gill, the commentator and children's advocate, made this necessary point in his Guardian blog:

there is tension between the positive vision of children's competences the plan implies, and some of the excessively risk-averse measures brought forward by government in recent years... Its policies on both antisocial behaviour and safeguarding urgently need to be rethought. If not they will undermine the goal of creating a society where young and old are more at ease with each other.

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.

Dancing in the Streets

My review of Barbara Ehrenreich's Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy has finally appeared in the Independent (the unedited version is in extended post below). It feels great to encounter so much post-Puritan, post-work-ethic scholarship these days. And though I think Barbara's a little too optimistic about the power of collective joy, especially in the face of the incredibly sophisticated strategies of the leisure corporations - see my Joga Bonita post a few months back - the book is overall a great back-up to the Play Ethic, and in particularly the theme of 'play as identity' it picks up from Brian Sutton-Smith.

Virginia Massacre: Losing the Battle of Who-Could-Care-Less

Here's a piece that was commissioned from me only a few days ago from my old paper, the Sunday Herald, an essay on the Virginia campus killings.  It's a ghastly event, and I feel for all the parents of students involved - my own daughter is about to go to an American college - but it does raise some contrarian thoughts in my head about how we can respond to certain kinds of violence in our societies. Not usual play-ethic territory, though careful readers will see the playful society hovering on the borders of the piece. But I hope it makes some sense. The unedited version is below, and I'll hotlink the references over the next few days.

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.

Don DeLillo on Today

Had to share this little Real Audio ram clip from the BBC Radio Four flagship news program, Today, interviewing Don DeLillo, my favourite modern American novelist. The occasion is the elevation of Underworld, his epic novel of 20th century American sport, politics and art, to the status of a Penguin Classic (which of course just gives me the opportunity to read it all over again, while I'm brewing up my own novel at the moment). Opening line: "I was driving a Lexus through a rustling wind..."

Escape from the poverty prison

I've written this short piece for the Sunday Herald, my old paper, this week, on the question of child poverty in Scotland. It's framed by this piece from another old colleague, Neil Mackay, on a really-struggling family in a towerblock in Glasgow (Neil, ever resourceful, has also put together this little film of his encounter). I know this doesn't seem like usual Play Ethic territory, but as the piece explains below, I think so much of this social dysfunction is a result of the long-term psychological deformations of industrial identity. And that a positive narrative for productivity and purposefulness - a play ethic to replace a work ethic - might be a solution.

Soulitarian Book Club

Got two e-mails this week from two old digital player-pals announcing their new books, and inviting me to their launches.

The one I'd love to just jet to New York to make (ok, take an eco-zeppelin) is McKenzie Wark's Gamer Theory - the book of the website. The one I may well trundle along to is Richard Barbrook's Imaginary Futures: from thinking machines to the global village (see these press releases). More below on both - but the ludic canon is growing apace. Might just have to start myself a 'Play Foundation' to organise it all...

Miliband the player?

I was reading Comment is Free today, and clicked through to this interview with possible-Labour-leadership-candidate David Miliband. The man has never really registered on my radar as anything other than one of these "PPE" boys (that's 'Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Oxford', to the uninitiated), born to manage the under-lettered. But then I'm a bit of a spare-time policy wonk myself, I write about a bit, so I shouldn't have been surprised to read this passage:

Across a range of policy areas, people would no longer be "spectators" of government but "players" in it, whether it was the business of recycling waste or taking part in the local fight against crime. "The notion that the country that succeeds will be the country of players not spectators is a very powerful notion. The audience has gone to the stage," he says.

This follows on from a bit of neat historical periodisation of different attitudes towards personal agency: