Plant - Bright Young Things (Review) (New Scientist 1996)Sadie Plant / text
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BOOKS & ARTS 20 July 1996
Review : Bright young things
Playing the Future by Douglas Rushkoff, HarperCollins,
$25 (available in Britain in November at £16.99), ISBN 0 06 017310
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RANDOMLY blinking LCD displays on VCRs tend to live in households without
children, and four-year-olds can program machines that bemuse their parents
completely. There is a widespread feeling that today’s children are entirely at
home with a pace of change which panics adults, making them paranoid.
In a wide ranging exploration of phenomena such as dance culture, tattooing,
Power Rangers and kids’ computing, Douglas Rushkoff argues in Playing the
Future that kids have learnt to thrive on chaos, flourish on
unpredictability and prosper in the midst of insecurities in ways from which
their parents must begin to learn. These “screenagers” are flexible and
adaptable, capable of processing information with unprecedented speed.
Every generation makes a break with the values and procedures of its parents.
But Rushkoff has no doubt that the distance between the parents and children of
the 1990s is more of a gulf than a generation gap. He launches a welcome
diatribe against the notion that we’ve seen all this before, and is scathing
about the “been there, done that” attitudes of a baby-boomer generation which
seems preprogrammed to see a re-run of the 1960s at work in every 1990s
phenomenon.
Rushkoff is also seeking a new sense of stability amid the unprecedented
chaos of the ways of life and thought he describes. But in his effort to find
order among the apparently random activities of screenagers, he often falls
victim to the paternalism he attacks.
This book also smacks of white, male American culture so that readers coming
from anywhere else may well be unable to decide whether their unfamiliarity with
certain elements of screenage culture is a consequence of a gap between
generations or continents. While he pays attention to Japanese anime comics and
films, Rushkoff tacitly assumes America’s culture is as young and advanced as
its own children. But the changes Rushkoff describes are themselves emerging in