‘Playful Identities’ research blog

According to Textually.org, a student has won a price awarded by Motorola for a competition to make the world “seamlessly mobile”. Student John Finan has written an essay (PDF) about a ‘mood phone’ that would be very useful for someone with e.g. the Asperger sydrome, a mild form of autism that makes it difficult to assess non-verbal clues.

This raises some interesting questions, e.g. whether human emotions are attributable to machines (yes, I think, to some extent), and how this transforms ‘the medium into the message’.

More info in this Herald Sun article.

On the right hand side, you will find an increasing number of links to other research projects I’ve come across. Many of these are in the form of a weblog too. This makes it easy for me to keep track of them by adding them in a really nice RSS reader I have just found for the Mac: Vienna. And it’s open source too!

An interesting one I just found is Torill Mortensen’s blog. She has written a little piece about work vs. play:

Work vs play
Make tea not war (wonderful name) in Wellington comments on our effort to make a researcher’s guild on Wow. Mostly it is a musing at how some people make their hobbies into their job.

This is interesting, because it says something about work as opposed to play, and positions itself in a discourse where certain assumptions are accepted as truth.

1) Playing because it is work can not really be fun.

2) A hobby has to become less interesting if you learn so much about it that it starts to appear to be work.

3) Work is something we do for the sake of duty, enjoying it makes it suspect unless the pleasure is tied to ambition, duty or hard-earned skill.

4) All study of something people do at their leisure is suspect, as the researcher appears to have found an excuse to spend more time with their hobbies than other people.

Luckily, there is more to work and play than this.

Came across the website of Ludicorp today, the business responsible for creating and developing social software like Flickr. I think their “corporate philosophy� - which they take from Disclosing New Worlds: Entrepreneurship, Democratic Action and the Cultivation of Solidarity by Charles Spinosa, Fernando Flores & Hubert Dreyfus (MIT Press 1997) - reflects quite a bit of what our research will be about:

Business owners do not normally work for money either. They work for the enjoyment of their competitive skill, in the context of a life where competing skillfully makes sense. The money they earn supports this way of life. The same is true of their businesses. One might think that they view their businesses as nothing more than machines to produce profits, since they do closely monitor their accounts to keep tabs on those profits.

But this way of thinking replaces the point of the machine’s activity with a diagnostic test of how well it is performing. Normally, one senses whether one is performing skillfully. A basketball player does not need to count baskets to know whether the team as a whole is in flow. Saying that the point of business is to produce profit is like saying that the whole point of playing basketball is to make as many baskets as possible. One could make many more baskets by having no opponent.

The game and styles of playing the game are what matter because they produce identities people care about. Likewise, a business develops an identity by providing a product or a service to people. To do that it needs capital, and it needs to make a profit, but no more than it needs to have competent employees or customers or any other thing that enables production to take place. None of this is the goal of the activity.

Now, what are the parts that triggered me?

“work for the enjoyment of their competitive skill”

> This ‘work ethic’ is also called the ‘ProAm’ revolution (Leadbeater) where professional amateurs become numerous and deliver high quality products and services, because they are amateurs in the original sense of the word (”doing something for the love of it”).
> Points to the blurring of work and leisure. ‘Play’ is to feel free of necessity (of work).

A basketball player does not need to count baskets to know whether the team as a whole is in flow.

> ‘Flow’ is the state of experiencing only the present, of feeling in charge, of wanting to participate, of suspending disbelief, etc. (term by the guy with the impossible name: Csikszentmihalyi).

The game and styles of playing the game are what matter because they produce identities people care about.

> Points to the intrinsic quality and value of the product one is producing, of the ‘magic’ in the object one is creating, just as Marcel Mauss shows is the case with reciprocate gift exchange (1908). It is not simply about the transaction that has a purely economic value, but about giving away something that is infused with one’s own personality and identity.

I have recently bought a bunch of anthropological classics, works written by well known anthropological oldies. These works I consider interesting for my research, because they introduce and elaborate concepts I think can be usefully applied - in moderated form perhaps - to the use of new technologies. Not only that, I think using older concepts and theories balance the tendency to see current (technological) developments as “radically new” and “revolutionary”, a “complete breach from everything we ever knew before”. Utter rubbish of course, most would agree Yet still the tendency is there to over-stress the newness of it all. Using older thoughts can counterbalance this a bit, I think.

Some titles:

• Arnold van Gennep - The Rites of Passage (originally published in 1908; useful because of its focus on socio-cultural change and the concept of liminality)
• Marcel Mauss - The Gift (orig. 1950; useful because gifts are a cultural/economic way of bonding, based on reciprocity. This, I believe, can be applied to the way people nowadays exchange SMS text messages, and little phone calls ’bout nothing’)
• Victor Turner - From Ritual to Theatre: the human seriousness of play (1982; Turner has written a lot on ritual. The exploration of playfulness in culture is useful for our topic ‘Playful Identities’)
• Mary Douglas - Natural symbols : explorations in cosmology (1970; Douglas also wrote a classic about purity and danger and taboo)

I also intend to read (or at least look into) a Dutch translation of Claude Lévi-Strauss’ ‘Tristes Tropiques’ my colleague Bibi gave me. Lots to read still in my own field, let alone beyond the boundaries of anthropology… :/

On new years day, I traditionally go to see a movie to recover from my hangover. Yesterday it was Grizzly Man by Werner Herzog. What a great movie! It’s a tale about Timothy Treadwell, who lived closely among grizzly bears in Alaska for 13 years, and ends up being eaten by one. It’s a basically a tragical story about a guy who tries to escape from the chaotic world outside of him and tries to become a better self. Treadwell tries to take his destiny into his own hands, but at the same time becomes more and more trapped in his fixed own world that in the end dictates him and destroys him. Timothy Treadwell is a ‘dead man’: he has already partly left this world to live in a world that only exists in his own phantasy: a beautiful, loving, pure, uncorrupted natural world. Treadwell’s time among the bears of Alaska was a kind of ‘liminoid phase’ (Victor Turner) between regular life and a next stage, in this case very literally: death.

The film has many aspects that have to do with identity, visible in the may paradoxes that were evident in Timothy Treadwell:
- Treadwell played with his own image: he developed a story about himself as being from Australia; he was performing outrage & anger in one of the last scenes against the park rangers (the forces that be in the human world), yet could easily switch back to being calm in the next second.
- Treadwell wasn’t always very consequent in his self-construction, e.g. when claiming that he was ‘the only person out there’, while it appeared that he was in company of a woman at least some of the time, which he tried to hide from public eye (camera).
- On the one hand, Treadwell was very vain, constantly fussing about his hair and doing stuff with bandana’s trying to conceal his receding hairline. On the other hand, he didn’t give much about material goods and status.
- He constantly stressed how dangerous it was among the bears, yet when something happened that didn’t coincide with his romantic view of noble, harmonious nature, he couldn’t accept it, as when a young bear got killed and eaten by starving elder bears.
- Treadwell anthropomorphised the animals, ascribing them human behaviour and characteristics.
- Treadwell’s work wasn’t about the bears as much as about himself becoming a new being: he confessed a few times in front of the camera about his troubled youth and told how he had overcome his problems. He shot many sequences of ‘action-takes’ that could later possible be used in a dramatised film about his life.
- Treadwell’s attempt to carve out a life of his own, be unique in what he does (”nobody can do this”), celebration of individualism, escapism from institutional structures, is a very modern thing, typically of this age.

Go see this film!!