Playing the Future: How Kids' Culture Can Teach Us to Thrive in an Age of Chaos - Hardcover

Rushkoff, Douglas

3.76

74 ratings by Goodreads

9780060173104: Playing the Future: How Kids' Culture Can Teach Us to Thrive in an Age of Chaos

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060173106 ISBN 13: 9780060173104

Publisher: HarperCollins, 1996

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The author of Cyberia explains how the media culture of today's youngsters is preparing them for the future and for a world in which surprise is constant and information pours in rapidly from hundreds of sources. $50,000 ad/promo. Tour.

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Review:

Just yesterday I read in the Busines Section of the New York Times that Rushkoff currently gets paid as much as $7,500 per hour to explain to VPs and CEOs of major corporations how to survive in a marketplace increasingly dominated by "channel-surfing gen-Xers". Whether you are a marketing mogul or one of the explicands curious about how your core being is being portrayed to media mavens, this is a book you should read -- if you've got the time.

Why the caveat? Much of his argument is that the much-dreaded "short attention span" is an adaptive response to a media-saturated world, which is probably no big surprise to you as an Internet user. But Rushkoff does have a way of making this and other seemingly basic arguments into a compelling and insightful book. My overall advice? Turn down any opportunities you might have to pay his $7,500 fees, and read a copy of this book instead.

From the Publisher:

Can a decreased attention span make us smarter consumers? How can the Power Rangers get us jobs in the high-tech workplace? Could the ultraviolent world of Doom actually be good for our kids?

From an emergent guru of cyberculture come surprising answers to these questions and an exuberant, myth-shattering look at our future as seen through the lifestyles of today's youth. Douglas Rushkoff, who has been called "the brilliant heir to McLuhan" by New Perspectives Quarterly, draws a welter of remarkably commonsensical conclusions about how we can learn from our kids to flourish in the next millennium -- as they will.

Global warming, racial tension, Third World rage, rapacious epidemic and myriad other global woes vie with less dire but no less unnerving phenomena -- from information overload to media manipulation -- to convince us that the apocalypse is about to pounce. Indeed, it will pounce on the unprepared, but there's no need for us to be caught unawares if we will learn from today's children. For those who grew up before computers became ubiquitous, the world is like a foreign country and we are its immigrants.

Our kids -- Rushkoff calls them "screenagers" -- are like those of any immigrant, fitting themselves more naturally into this terra incognito than we can. Rushkoff demystifies the appeal of dozens of kids' cultural totems -- Barney, Power Rangers, Pogs, skateboards, Nintendo, Beavis and Butt-head, gangsta rap, body piercing and more -- that have unnerved or baffled parents, pundits and educators. He also goes beyond mere explanation to prove how the trappings of "screenagers'" lives are preparing them for the future, a discontinuous realm where surprise is the only constant and information pours in from innumerable sources at warp speed.

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