Playing the Future: How Kids' Culture Can Teach Us to Thrive in an Age of Chaos - Hardcover

Rushkoff, Douglas

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060173106 ISBN 13: 9780060173104

Publisher: HarperCollins, 1996

Synopsis

Can a decreased attention span make us smarter consumers? How can the Power Rangers get us jobs in the high-tech workplace? Could the ultraviolet world of Doom actually be good for our kids?
From an emergent guru of cyberculture come surprising answers to these questions and an exuberant, myth-shattering look at our future as seen through the life-styles of today's youth. Rushkoff draws a welter of remarkably commonsensical conclusions about how we can learn from our kids to flourish in the next millennium - as they will.
For those of us who grew up before computers became ubiquitous, the world is like a foreign country and we are its immigrants. Our kids - Rushkoff calls them "screenagers" - are like those of any immigrant, fitting themselves more naturally into this terra incognita than we can. Rushkoff demystifies the appeal of dozens of kids' cultural totems - Barney, Power Rangers, Pogs, skateboards, Nintendo, Beavis and Butt-head, gangsta rap, body piercing, and more - that have unnerved or baffled parents, pundits, and educators. He also goes beyond mere explanation to prove how the trappings of screenagers' lives are preparing them for the future, a discontinuous realm where surprise is the only constant and information pours in from innumerable sources at warp speed. Finally, Rushkoff shows how we can alter our own work habits and worldviews to incorporate the playful wisdom that will ensure screenagers' success in the unpredictable world that's already upon us.

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Reviews

A cyberculture cicerone, Rushkoff (Media Virus) leads the reader through heady glimpses of the millennium-the 21st century where "We are all immigrants to a new territory." And on whom do immigrants usually rely for adjustment and acculturation? Their children, of course. Rushkoff describes today's "screenager"-the child of the computer/electronic age-as the shaper of a new, evolutionary milieu where change is a constant and chaos can be a good thing. Simplistically, Rushkoff advises parents and educators to relax and appreciate the adaptive skills of their children, and to look to them "for answers to some of our own problems adapting to postmodernity." This post-McLuhan view of a world where Barney and mob behavior can be connected is, in its untrammeled enthusiasm for media, demanding, often bewildering reading for anyone not tuned in to Power Rangers or Pulp Fiction. $50,000 ad/promo; foreign rights: David Vigliano.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Kaffee-klatsch musings masquerade as visionary insight in this hopelessly square Baedeker to what we can learn from today's youth, or ``screenager,'' culture. That loud humming you hear is all the '90s buzzwords, from chaos to Gak (a goo product that kids play with) to holism, that Rushkoff totemistically lards throughout the text. Rushkoff, who has made his reputation as a cyber-based interpreter of the media (Media Virus, 1994, etc.), strives to be a futurist, painting a broad, appealing picture of things to come from practices as various as body-piercing and fantasy role-playing in computer games--but the effect he achieves is really dej… vu. Change a few names and dates and we're right back in the '60s, with all the sincere, straight-jawed exegeses of ``what we can learn from the younger generation.'' Throw in a few megabytes and the answers aren't that different either. According to Rushkoff, the kids (and in the author's chronology ``kid'' seems to be anyone under 34) can teach us to appreciate multiple viewpoints; they can help us surf chaos by finding meaning in the moment and in community; they can help us get back in touch with nature. Rushkoff partially acknowledges his debt to Marshall McLuhan and Carl Jung, but much of his ``new'' thinking, especially on chaos, is as old as Bergson and Proust. Rushkoff does make a strong case for the relative harmlessness of electronic violence, comparing video games to dreams. He may proclaim metaphor dead, but this is just one example of his rather lively dependence on it: From Power Rangers to video games, he analyzes artifacts of screenager culture, trying to tease out their larger metaphorical significance. Of course, by deriving broad, fixed meaning from fragments of an atomized culture, he's not only contradicting himself, but revealing that he's an old fogy who can't hang ten on chaos. ($50,000 ad/promo; author tour) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0060173106
• ISBN 13: 9780060173104
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288