Edited by Pat Kane (email)


:: Sociology gets physical (and fierce) ::

I always knew sociology would get hip again...No one making it more so that Loic Wacquant, who wrote a two-volume study on the social effects of boxing on poor American communities by doing some intensive field work... ie becoming a boxer himself. He got pretty good too - achieving a Golden Gloves regional final. He calls this a new kind of discipline - "carnal sociology" or "ethnography by immersion." From the New York Times:

The goal, he says, is to convey his subjects' world by experiencing it firsthand — in the case of his boxers, from the point of view of their sweaty, pummeled bodies. It's an ambition, he insists, that represents a radical departure from what passes as ethnography today

"Either people are portrayed as maximizing computing machines pursuing their interests, or they're portrayed as symbolic animals that manipulate language and obey norms because they're members of a group," Mr. Wacquant said at a cafe near the campus here, throwing up his hands in dismay. "What's missing is that people are first and foremost embodied, carnal beings of blood and flesh who relate to the world in a passionate way."

He has a visceral understanding of what draws poor black men to the sport...It's not the money, not the fame or the possibility of occupational mobility," none of which are likely to be forthcoming, he said. "What binds boxers to their gym is just how gripping it is. It's the sheer sensuous, aesthetic and moral experience of being embedded in that universe."

I suppose that logic makes Kevin Warwick the only man who can theorise properly about cyborgs...I'd like to put Loic and the Beck Futures finalists Inventory in a ring, and see what their Fierce Sociology's left hook is like.


:: Happiness Studies ::

Yet another major tome wondering about the "Paradox of Progress" - ie, why we in the developed West are less happy than you'd predict, from our levels of prosperity - written by US critic Gregg Easterbrook. I'm always interested in the solutions proposed in these arguments - there's been quite a few recently - which always tend towards liberal-left policies.

Easterbook's list of unhappiness triggers - envy, lack of sleep, future-shock, "bad news" media - might be remedied, he suggests, by a raised minimum wage, universal health care, restraints on gargantuan CEOs, and more foreign aid. Richard Reeves has waged an admirable essay campaign to get the UK government to accept that, after a point of prosperity, collective well-being becomes more important than individual prosperity.

Is the notion of a "creative commons" becoming more than a buzz-phrase or a cute IP contract? Might it begin to describe a prosperous society's guarantees of security and enablement (citizen's wage, shorter working week, free media, etc), which then allows for the exploration of personal meaning, fulfilment, happiness (which I'd call a "players' agenda")?


:: Flow into that Scrum! ::

Of course, maybe you need to explore your consciousness a little, before you could make the best of a creative commons - otherwise the Gordon Brown charge of "sitting around all day, watching television, doing nothing" might kick in... Very happy to see Maynard Keynes' representative on earth, Will Hutton, advocating exactly that kind of deep self-connection
in the Observer this week, by talking about the great Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's concept of flow. The World Cup rugby gives him the excuse:

Flow doesn't come from accenting the muscularity of rugby - desire, hurt, destroy, and dominate are the watchwords of the English coaches - but from helping each player to reach into himself to control his consciousness and then subsume himself in the service of the team. It's a language of concentration, focus and, ultimately, of pleasure.

Apparently, the French team has it in spades.


:: If the Kidults are United -- ::

I'm quoted in a Scotsman piece examining the kidult phenomenon:

"I think we have a player’s generation," Kane says. "Having lived through the end of Communism, the internet and mobile revolutions, CGI movies, the flexible workplace and at least three video-game wars with Afghanistan and Gulf wars I and II, the 17-40 age group just expects the world to be a simulation and a performance, their lives lived as games or scripts. Reality for them/us is unstable and unpredictable, requiring skill and wit and sharpness to navigate, but which can always be rebooted and started again...This generation is now coming to cultural and social leadership."

Kane disagrees with the idea that playing, whether with video games or not, is a way for adultescents to avoid real life. Instead, he argues that play should not be the prerogative of the young but that it is a vital way for everyone to better understand the world. It is too important to be written off as kids’ stuff.

"Play can be about power, contest, facing uncertainty and risk bravely, the difficulties of playing along with others in a community and so on," he says. "Adult play is the experimentalism and optimism of child play maintained into adulthood and augmented by experience, knowledge and skills...So I think there are some continuities between childhood and adulthood, in terms of play, which should be maintained, not broken."

:: - Then The Kids Will Never Be Defeated*::

Non-sequitur piece by Dave Hill in the Guardian, as to whether kids are being colonised by merchandising. His crucial caveat: haven't they always? Haven't little girls always raided their mum's wardrobes? Haven't little boys always been obsessive collectors of moulded plastic forms? Em, yes.

Elsewhere in the same paper - one cannot accuse Farringdon road of not being a player's paradise - Maggie Brown cites an extensive study of kids attitudes to television And guess what? They know perfectly well that everything before them is a venal construction of meaning, aimed at distorting their attention span and channelling their desires. And what is the most frightening judgement for marketeers that a modern screenage can make? "It's fake, man". Should we be trusting our children more for their critical instincts?

* - apologies to all old punks for Sham 69 reference. Talking of which, see what punk can do for sectarian division...


:: Play Times ::

Me++ "I am part of the networks and the networks are part of me. I am visible to Google. I link, therefore I am" (William Mitchell). If so, then you're the kind of person who will rejoice that they've found something sociable to do with their Bluetooth'd mobile phones. Hello, "blue-jacking".

Computer Games as Literacy It's creeping up on a curriculum and workplace training program near you... Evidence that it makes for better workers. And a new category for games that intend to do more than jab your thrill centres: Water Cooler Games.


If you're going to give out promotional crap in the workplace... choose wisely. For the only choices are: Successories. Or to your left, Despair, Inc. The dangers of too much 'flow' - and too little?


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