Edited by Pat Kane (email)

NOTE: Play Journal will be taking a short summer break - we'll be back to regular weekly frequency on 31st July. But check out my guest blogging on Zack Lynch's Brainwaves column on Corante.com, from July 28th to August 1st. Best wishes, get some sand in your toes. - PK


:: The Maker's Mark ::

How might the Play Ethic - understood as a collective belief in the values of openness, experiment, and engagement - relate to the culture of branding?

My own attempts at informing a play-ethical commercial brand - in particular, some consulting to BBH's UK campaign for Microsoft's X-Box - have been...instructive.

One X-Box television ad showed life in Britain as a scream of pain and fear from birth to death, from womb to tomb: the other imagined a pre-lapsarian world before the work ethic, where humans and animals were both "good musicians", moving in harmony to a neolithic rave beat. The first noted that "life is short" (literally), the second that we should "work less": the solution for both is that we should "Play More".

All this pop surrealism, in order to encourage young men from 16-30 to shift their gaming to a slightly different moulding of circuits and plastic. (Though, praise Proteus, hackers are starting to fool around with their X-Boxes - presuming Microsoft can bear it).

In No Logo, Naomi Klein broadly frames the imagery of play in Western brands - all the agency, passion and imagination evoked by Nike's Just Do It athleticism, the Gap's hip sociability, Starbucks' shopping-mall bohemia - as an outright mystification.

Behind each product - shoe, snood, or snack-with-coffee - lay a parlous record of labour relations in some far-off corner of the globalised economy. So far, so Marxist: and much of Klein's success was in bringing the insights of the Great Bearded One's critiques - particularly his ideas about the commodity-as-fetish - to a new audience, unused to such 19th century intellectual rigours.

Since Klein's first appearance in 1999, the debate about the ethical risibility of Western brands has only intensified - and in the current post-September 11th, post-Iraq climate of neo-militarism, it's almost reaching crisis point.

Newsweek and the Independent cites a report from the marketing agency RoperASW that, for the first time, major American brands like Microsoft and MTV (not just the usual Nike and McDonald's) are registering a substantial decline in world approval ratings.

It's been backed up by figures as esteemed as the dean of the Harvard Business School, the perfectly named John Quelch:

Never before have global concerns about American foreign policy so threatened to change consumer behaviour... We are not speaking here of the frivolous grandstanding associated with temporary boycotts by a student minority. We are witnessing the emergence of a consumer lifestyle with broad international appeal that is grounded in a rejection of American capitalism, American foreign policy and Brand America.

Quoted in the same article, the ad agency McCann-Erikson also recently advised its clients not to "wrap their brands" in the American flag. The US "war on terrorism" risked "tarnishing the reputation of American culture and the mythic 'American Dream', which has long drawn consumers round the world to the United States to live, work or visit".

So ethically speaking, it seems that we are polarised about brand capitalism. Do you either follow the activist path of Naomi Klein, critiquing neo-liberalism and its commercial cultures, but stay deliberately open about possible alternatives?

Or do you keep your corporate head down ("underplaying your American-British origins", as the Independent writer suggests) and wait for a more ameliorative Presidency/Prime Ministership?

Either the righteous hairshirt, or the dissembling mask, is a limited wardrobe of options for both these global players.

Can we think of a position that transcends and includes them both? Micheal Wilmott's Citizen Brands (on Amazon.co.uk) was a respectable recent attempt to suggest a range of strategies for companies and governments to establish (or improve) their ethical credibility, faced with this new lifestyle militancy.

But Wilmott's recommendations for companies was very simple: if you don't really mean it, don't do it - because in the age of total information awareness (which now goes both ways), any shortfall between declared values and actual practices will be quickly noted and proclaimed. This justifies one part of the Economist's case against Naomi Klein - that brand capitalism could actually help keep business ethical, because it is so acutely sensitive to these new citizen-consumers' whims and demands (on these, see Shoshana Zuboff's new book).


:: All We Are Saying...Is Give Peace A Brand? ::

Yet the notion of "greenwash" is a caution to anyone who thinks that aligning corporations and citizens along shared progressive values is easily do-able.

For example, I'm part of a new network called PeacePlus (here's an opening blog and some contacts), which is trying to explore new strategies and contexts for the peace movement.

Within this broad agenda, I'm particularly fascinated by the prospect of a kind of "pacific consultancy" to organisations and businesses, along the lines of the "environmental consultancy" represented by SustainAbility or Forum For the Future.

Many entries in our blog point to the same questions: what are the energetic and creative (rather than defensive and resistant) cultures of peace that individuals and organisations could aspire to? (There would also be some "peace basics" that one would have to adhere to, before the positive agenda could be explored - eg, see the investment guidelines on military components for the Norwegian Government Petroleum Fund).

In terms of an ethic of play, this is the most global perspective of all. How is it possible to keep our games of culture, commerce and technology tending towards the infinite and ever-more-reciprocally-connected, rather than the finite and falsely victorious?

Might there be an active interest in the promotion of peaceful values, by exactly those worried business thinkers and marketeers quoted earlier - for whom a reduction in the richness of human global reciprocation directly hits their bottom line? And whose consumers are now actively taking to protest -even in peacetime?

There's obviously a danger of "PeaceWash", too - where corporations and organisation appropriate the symbolisms and gestalt of peace movements, but don't fully contribute to a pacific world culture. And Naomi K has already tried to outline how incompatible traditional branding is with democratic self-determination. (Always remember the sizzle of the iron on cattle flesh when you think of the word: a useful and cautionary synaesthesia).

But is there no conversation to be had about peace with enterprises and organisations - many of whom might at least prefer a world dominated by soft power rather than hard power? What do you think?


:: Screenagers! Typical! ::

Play and education are long and historic partners: Jean-Jacques Rousseau first asserted the child's right to play, as a way of understanding the world, in his ground-breaking Romantic text, Emile.

But add computers and networks, and education becomes a key site for play ethics. Exactly what literacies - or "multiliteracies" are appropriate for players rather than workers? And who has the definitive expertise in the information age - adults or children?

Two stories which illustrate why the values of play should always be the prime factor in techno-literacy. In the Independent's education section, a plea from the recently retired UK education minister Estelle Morris to make sure that "all schoolchildren have access to a portable computer by 2006".

Her motives are impeccable: to reduce the "digital divide" in British society, which means that upper-income families are five times more likely to own a computer than lower income families.

The teachers quoted are divided. One says that because teenagers are "amazingly adaptable", the important thing is to get decent equipment out there (some schools quoted in the piece are already going wireless). Another is more gloomy, and more eloquent: "pledging to give every child a laptop is like giving them all a Shakespeare play - all very well, but the important thing is how you make use of it".

Yet this wonderful story from the Times should encourage the liberals: let the kids' play with the machines. Easiest just to quote the beginning:

GO TO a slum district of Delhi, put a computer with an internet connection into a public wall and leave it on. Wait and watch through a remote video camera rigged up on a nearby tree. Children who cannot read or write, with no English but blazing with curiosity, come along and start fiddling with the weird contraption that has surfaced out of nowhere.

Eight minutes later, children who do not know what a computer is are navigating the web. By evening more than 70 are surfing the net. Days later they are playing games, creating folders, cutting and pasting, creating short cuts.

A fluke? That is what Dr Sugata Mitra, who conducted the experiment three years ago, thought, too. So he repeated it. Even in remote wildernesses, where the only mouse that desperately deprived children knew was the furry kind, Mitra kept seeing the same extraordinary results: children learning basic computer literacy on their own, with no instruction.

Thrillingly, the Delhi kids have devised their own vocabulary for the icons on the screen - which of course have their ludic overtones: "the cursor is 'sui' (Hindi for needle) and the hourglass is the 'damru', after the hourglass drum that the Hindu god Shiva plays".

We're only at the beginning of a discussion about a new education system for the information age - how we can collectively resource our children's own passionate enthusiam for literacy and articulacy, through new media. But globalized stories like this give me great hope that, at least from the small ones upwards, there will be no shortage of invention and commitment. And that kids' master skill - play - will be at the heart of it.


:: Play Times ::

Kids' dominion: Appropriately enough, the youth are running their rule over everything this week...

Guilty by association (FT, pay-per-view) Never mind anti-Americanism as a threat to brand values - what about South-London criminality? When brands become the province of the "wrong" kind of players/playas ... And the integrity of kids' education - this time around health and obesity - opens up another front for brand activists.

Fabarooney The normal dyspeptic Guardian columnist Catherine Bennett on the joys of CBeebies, the BBC's "popular and sublimely non-vulgar children's channel". This Journal is particularly fond of those wobbly ameobas that link the programmes. As if our 21st century kids needed to be told they were protean and fun-loving...

Abusing the infrastructure Glasgow and Dundee kids are doing what American kidshave done for years: uncapping the fire hydrants, to relieve blazing heat. The safety call is fair enough: but the poietic dexterity of these scheme kids is something to see... Meanwhile, another juvenile delinquency - graffiti - gets the full art-house treatment: a feature on the elusive London street defacer, Banksy.

Join...