The other day, I was listening to "Planet Mikey", a sports call in show on WEEI-AM here in Boston, and I was struck at how caller after caller could critique Julio Lugo's performance the night before (awful), Papelbom's pitching (surprisingly awful), and Youkelis' home runs (unexpected). The callers were able to cite batting strategies, on-base statistics, batting averages, you name it. Pretty impressive.
And yet... after generations of sports fandom, what has it gotten us? A more numerical literate populace? (no). An improved ability to construct a coherent argument? (not for many of the callers). A community of like-minded souls who bond together outside of baseball for more civic-minded enterprises? (we're lucky if they vote).
My point being, fans have been around for a very long time, and number in the millions. Why do we think that now, with the application of digital media, this new breed of fan will be able to make that cognitive leap from enjoying an entertaining pastime to gaining cognitive skills that can be applied across domains? Just wondering.
Friday, May 16, 2008
A thought on the benefits of fandom
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1 comments:
The advantage which sports gives us is a sense of competition, game, and play. Those three elements are key to learning in unfamiliar territory. Remembering stats is part of playing the game of being a fan. Look at highly intellectual learning experiences for children such as FIRST and you will see the same type of dedication and the pay off which comes from it.
Sports, play and fandom are all part of learning and why things like simulation are growing so dramatically these days. It’s the sense of competition in being a fan which gives us such intellectual success as String Ducky for String Theory. That particular case shows exactly how being a fan can create the drive within a person to then move out of simply being a fan and act, learn and contribute to the overall collective intelligence of us as a race on this Earth.
In addition, what you were hearing on Planet Mikey was probably not an individual’s knowledge, but instead both the product of collective intelligence and also the practice of it. Many people pooling their knowledge to expand something and discuss a subject creatively. So what it sounds like on the surface is statistics, but in actuality it’s the beauty of knowledge learned from many people all coming together. Such practice has created the greatest human success from heart stents to Wikipedia.
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