Participation and Transcendence

I like to close my eyes and take in the music at a concert, esp. at a concert I've been dragged to by friends with different taste sets than my own. Last February, for instance, I attended a show that had people sitting outwards in a circle in the dark listening to the sounds of a dying espresso machine. It was majestic.

Seeing as how we are all being goaded into participating in culture in some way, some are already wondering what is going to happen to little things like reflection, privacy, individual authorship, etc. Now we have to put up with the little snot-nosed darlings ruining the theatre experience:

Yes, this remote [online] participation is a very different and possibly less "genuine" experience compared to the real-time fun of panto, but anyone who has recently sat in a play next to a school group knows that their online confidence seems to translate into an assumed right to "interact" with real actors, whether welcome or not... My suspicion is that the real creative experience kids are lacking, and which theatre is ideally placed to provide, is the opportunity to shut up, listen and lose themselves - to actually cast aside their self-consciousness for a couple of hours and quietly become immersed in voices and lives other than their own.

Imagine. To lose oneself in the experience of others. Transcendence is a basic human need; this is why people in virtually every culture take drugs or have some kind of ritual that allows the individual to disappear for a moment. I don't know about you but all this talk of performance and identity and lack of privacy makes me want to run and hide under a pile of books or a hut in the deep woods somewhere.

Research Protocols in Hell

After I ran into a reference to this article for the third time today, I decided I'd better check it out. Titled "A Librarian's Worst Nightmare", it chronicles the Yahoo! Answers site and its miserably low standards for vetting information:

It encourages bad research habits, rewards people who post things that aren't true, and frequently labels factual errors as correct information. It's every middle-school teacher's worst nightmare about the Web.

Welcome to user-generated information. To be fair, I don't want to slam the whole 'social construction of knowledge' movement. But since when is the majority opinion always the correct one? How many times in American history have the majority been a mob? How many popular narratives are based on the idea of the lone person who actually understands what's truly going on?

Just for kicks, you might want to check out information on Tocqueville's "tyranny of the majority" here and here. And then there's a favorite quote, from Jonathan Swift: "When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him." Put that in your pipe and smoke it the next time you're looking for information or shouted down on a public online.

Second Laugh

Sorry, but I need to chuckle maliciously. Guess what? There's very few people who actually spend an appreciable amount of time on Second Life:. MediaShift quotes this Wired Article this past spring which tells the sad, lonely tale of a Mad Ave executive scouting out the potential SL market:

So one day last fall, he downloaded the Second Life software, created an avatar, and set off in search of other brands like his own. American Apparel, Reebok, Scion — the big ones were easy to find, yet something felt wrong: "There was nobody else around." He teleported over to the Aloft Hotel, a virtual prototype for a real-world chain being developed by the owners of the W. It was deserted, almost creepy. "I felt like I was in The Shining."

But hype being what it is, the executive decided to invest in SL.

More to the point, though, is MediaShift's perspective of the cycle of media hype, with reporters repeating and referring to earlier, glowing reports. Everyone wants a better world; everyone wants a breakthrough technology that will help us meager anthropods transcend our terrestrial limitations. But where is the independent reporting here? It reminds me of the research I reported on last spring out of Columbia that spoke of 'cumulative advantage theory' of social online behavior. In short, we tend to believe what others believe. Makes one wonder that, instead of digital media liberating us, it's yoking us together with one another to a greater extent...

The Death of Symbolic Play

(first -- yes, it's been awhile. Apologies all around. Such is the life of the periodic blogger, and blog reader).

second... this article in the New York Times effectively blew my mind the other day. In short, it suggests that parents are buying their toddlers new tech toys that are very much like their real life counterparts:

Cellphones, laptops, digital cameras and MP3 music players are among the hottest gift items this year. For preschoolers.

Toy makers and retailers are filling shelves with new tech devices for children ages 3 and up, and sometimes even down. They say they are catering to junior consumers who want to emulate their parents and are not satisfied with fake gadgets.

Consider the “hottest toys” list on Amazon.com, which includes the Easy Link Internet Launch Pad from Fisher-Price (to help children surf on “preschool-appropriate Web sites”) and the Smart Cycle, an exercise bike connected to a video game.

Jim Silver, editor of Toy Wishes magazine and an industry analyst for 24 years, said there had been “a huge jump in the last 12 months” in toys that involve looking at a screen.

“The bigger toy companies don’t even call it the toy business anymore,” Mr. Silver said. “They’re in the family entertainment business and the leisure business. What they’re saying is, ‘We’re vying for kids’ leisure time.’ ”

"Kids' leisure time"? Wow. It's no longer play.



What's more, parents are allegedly buying up Baby's First Bluetooth because the children are not satisfied with the play versions:

Yunice Kotake, of San Bruno, Calif., recently purchased a Fisher-Price Knows Your Name Dora Cell Phone for her twin year-old daughters. But a few days later, she returned the play phone to a local Toys “R” Us, after she found that the girls seemed to prefer their parents’ actual phones.

“They know what a real cellphone is, and they don’t want a fake one,” Ms. Kotake said

One wonders who these wee communicators are going to call on their proto cellphones, and what they might say if they managed to correctly dial a number. They might say, "Help! I'm being held hostage by well-meaning parents who are nevertheless projecting crazy capacities onto me! C'mon, I'm just a kid!" Or perhaps they would just scream something in gibberish, which is, after all, the expected dialect of the modern cellphone.

On my lap is an article "Pre-school children's cognitive development through pretend play" by (believe it or not) Jane Doe, (available at http://www.ematusov.com/cd170), just one of approximately a billion articles that suggest that pretend play -- the ability to pretend to drink out of a cup, use a spoon or other absent object -- is critical to the development of symbolic language and creativity. Pretend play allows children to freely experiment and master objects in their environment. I'm not sure how all this plays out in 2 year olds getting hooked up with a Razr3, but it does make one wonder...