by Douglas Rushkoff
Reviewed by Mike Eisenberg (August, 1999)
Every generation of adult humans exhibits a profound, irresistible, biological urge to complain bitterly about the young. Kids -- take your pick -- have no manners, show no discipline, can't think critically, pay no attention to their elders, care only about sex, care only about money, care only about themselves... In our own era, there has been a special sort of spin on this traditional rhetoric in which technology and media play the role of demonic catalyst. The reasoning, loosely, goes something like this: we know that kids today are a lot worse than they've ever been -- certainly a lot worse than we were some twenty or thirty years back -- so the cause of this decline must lie in the most visible arenas of change during that time. This in turn produces the usual list of suspects: television -- maybe cable television -- computers, the Internet, video games, skateboards, backwards baseball caps, and Ricky Martin.
It's easy to poke fun at this style of reasoning, digging up quotes from ancient writers about how the new generation of fifth-century-B.C. Athenian children is going to hell. But it's worth being just a bit cautious here: after all, just because every generation of adults likes to complain doesn't necessarily mean that some generations of adults (perhaps including this one) aren't justified in their alarm. In other words, maybe those previous adults were wrong, but today's adults are right. Things have, in fact, changed. And technology does make a difference -- maybe a large, systematic, and ominous difference -- in the lives of the young. When kids spend significant portions of their days watching television (or playing video games, or surfing the Net, or whatever) it's only fair to ask what the impact of those activities might be.
All of this makes Douglas Rushkoff's book Playing the Future just a little more subversive. Where other writers see a generation of television-created illiterates, or video-game addicts, or disaffected slackers with short attention spans, Rushkoff sees a new edition of humanity:
"Those of us intent on securing an adaptive strategy for the coming millennium need look no further than our own children for reassuring answers to the myriad of uncertainties associated with the collapse of the culture we have grown to know and love. Our kids may be younger than us, but they are also newer. They are the latest model of human being, and are equipped with a whole lot of new features. Looking at the world of children is not looking backwards at our own pasts--it's looking ahead. They are our evolutionary future."
Rushkoff elaborates on this theme throughout the book, looking at a broad selection of icons from youth culture (at least youth culture as of 1996) and finding things to admire. His topics include Gak, Power Rangers, Barney, Doom, Pogs, goth culture, raves, and snowboarding. As a rule, he has friendly things to say about all of these, seeing them as resonant with a larger zeitgeist of fast-moving, "discontinuous", "nonlinear" thinking.
If you read that last paragraph carefully, one element of the topic list might have jumped out. He has friendly things to say about Barney? Here's Rushkoff on the subject:
"Most adults hate Barney. We have trouble understanding how this saccharine, costumed purple dinosaur could so captivate our children.... Kids are fascinated by Barney because he is conjured. In the first moments of each show--moments most parents probably ignore because they look like opening credits--Barney is summoned into being. He is a small, stuffed dinosaur sitting in a tire swing. The children perform an incantation over the doll with their song, and Barney grows, like a rubber-suited Japanese monster, into a human-sized dinosaur who plays with them and understands their problems. At the show's end, Barney says good-bye and reverts to his inanimate form.... Barney does not promote family values in the traditional sense. No one on the show is related to anyone else. There is no parent or leader. The world of Barney is spontaneous, free-wheeling anarchy. It just so happens that this looks much more friendly than people would imagine."
Rushkoff's book is strongest in passages like these, where he pauses to watch, carefully, what it is that kids are doing and seeing. This is the kindest thing any adult can do for kids--to take time and pay attention. Rushkoff's tone is always respectful, sweet-tempered, and generous. Basically, he just tends to like kids, so he responds positively to the things they like as well.
Which leads to some of the problems with the book. First, Rushkoff's attitude toward kids' culture is (to my taste) a little too reflexive for comfort. In this view, if kids like it, it must be good, a harbinger of future times, a sign of the evolutionary progress of humanity. Thus, channel-surfing, for instance, is not a kind of mindless slack-jawed dip in the image-bath of television (which is frankly my own experience) but rather a creative, empowering act:
"[T]he ability to piece together meaning from a discontinuous set of images is the act of a higher intellect, not a lower one.... [T]he child with the ability to pull himself out of a linear argument while it is in progress, reevaluate its content and relevance, and then either recommit or move on, is a child with the ability to surf the modern mediaspace. He is also immune to many of the methods of programming and persuasion foisted so easily upon our unsuspecting, well-behaved viewers. He refuses to be drawn in as a passive, receive-only audience member."
An interesting enough observation, but where's the evidence? Are there studies showing that channel-surfing children are more skeptical or less passive than those who watch programs all the way through? (Or better yet, than children who watch little or no television at all?) And then, suppose that there is an element of skill to channel-surfing -- that should mean that some kids are better at it than others. What makes for an expert channel-surfer as opposed to an inexpert one? Shouldn't we expect that some kids -- maybe most -- are just plain clumsy at playing the remote control? And if that is so, why should we expect that channel-surfing would benefit its least proficient practitioners? And by the way, what if there isn't any meaning to be pieced together from that discontinuous set of images; or what if the meaning is a trivial one? These are questions that should follow naturally from Rushkoff's view, but he never pauses long enough in Playing the Future to pose the darker questions. Instead, he moves from one topic to another, always poking holes in the arguments of tut-tutting adult culture, but never challenging himself.
And then there's the question of just what this new culture consists of. To me, the most problematic -- I guess I'd have to say irritating -- aspect of Playing the Future is the careless way that it tosses around terms like nonlinearity, fractals, dynamical systems, and so forth. In mathematics or physics these terms can carry at least a certain degree of precision; but in Playing the Future, they are basically catchall synonyms for "new" or "good". Something fast-moving and novel is "nonlinear", while something old-fashioned or slow-paced is "linear". Rushkoff, of course, is hardly the only writer to adapt the hot terminology from scientific writing into his own ideas; and to be fair, maybe there is some larger zeitgeist at work here in which the ideas of dynamical systems theory find their emotional counterparts in other realms, much as echoes of Newtonian mechanics find their way into the political writing of John Locke and Adam Smith. But there is just too little substance in words like "discontinuous" when applied to the media experience of today's children. (If the word means something like "liable to shift rapidly in tone or plotline", then the plays of Euripides, most of Shakespeare's tragedies, several of Buster Keaton's comedies, and almost all early Bugs Bunny cartoons seem plenty "discontinuous" to me.)
The larger problem with Rushkoff's treatment is that it relies almost exclusively on observation and description. It doesn't really offer much in the way of theory, prediction, or lasting insight. Effectively, just about anything that kids might conceivably do could meet with Rushkoff's approval, as long as it was demonstrably popular; and conversely, just about anything that kids don't do (or used to do, but don't anymore) must be an instance of outmoded, linear thinking. But of course there are risks in this sort of analysis. Things have changed even since 1996, when Playing the Future was published. Thus, here is Rushkoff on the subject of Gak:
"With Gak, you don't pretend to do something else, you play with Gak. Tops and yo-yos were gravity-based toys, whose entertainment value was based in competition, endurance, or technical proficiency. Gak demands no such arc of pleasure or level of skill. It is purely experiential."
Meaning... what, exactly? Perhaps that we should no longer expect to see many children playing with those old-fashioned gravity-based toys like yo-yos... Except there's a problem here. Yo-yos are hot again; indeed, in the past three years, they seem to have sprouted up everywhere. (Apparently a major reason for the resurgence of the yo-yo is that the newer materials of which the toys are made allow for an easier learning curve.) Presumably, Rushkoff will have positive things to say about yo-yos in some future edition of his book, but the larger point is that his analysis can't really inform us about why yo-yos are now hot, popular, "nonlinear" objects and tops are still antiquated, ho-hum, gravity-based, "linear" objects. That sort of analysis will have to await a more careful, less studiedly hip and jargon-ridden treatment than Playing the Future; but it will build on the sort of joyful and respectful attention to kids' culture that Playing the Future exemplifies.