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

Douglas Rushkoff (Author)

Book Description

An emergent guru of mass culture who has been called "the brilliant heir to Marshall McLuhan" by New Perspectives Quarterly delivers an exuberant myth-shattering look at how our children's culture reveals the sighposts of the future. For any parent who wonders what their kids are up to and why, this book is essential reading.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com 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 Publishers Weekly

A cyberculture cicerone, Rushkoff (Media Virus) leads the reader through heady glimpses of the millennium-the 21st century where "We are all immigrants to a new territory." And on whom do immigrants usually rely for adjustment and acculturation? Their children, of course. Rushkoff describes today's "screenager"-the child of the computer/electronic age-as the shaper of a new, evolutionary milieu where change is a constant and chaos can be a good thing. Simplistically, Rushkoff advises parents and educators to relax and appreciate the adaptive skills of their children, and to look to them "for answers to some of our own problems adapting to postmodernity." This post-McLuhan view of a world where Barney and mob behavior can be connected is, in its untrammeled enthusiasm for media, demanding, often bewildering reading for anyone not tuned in to Power Rangers or Pulp Fiction. $50,000 ad/promo; foreign rights: David Vigliano.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Harpercollins; 1st edition (June 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060173106
• ISBN-13: 978-0060173104
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,323,190 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Winner of the first Neil Postman award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity, Douglas Rushkoff is an author, teacher, and documentarian who focuses on the ways people, cultures, and institutions create, share, and influence each other's values. He sees "media" as the landscape where this interaction takes place, and "literacy" as the ability to participate consciously in it.

His ten best-selling books on new media and popular culture have been translated to over thirty languages. They include Cyberia, Media Virus, Playing the Future, Nothing Sacred: The Truth about Judaism, and Coercion, winner of the Marshall Mcluhan Award for best media book. Rushkoff also wrote the acclaimed novels Ecstasy Club and Exit Strategy and graphic novel, Club Zero-G. He has just finished a book for HarperBusiness, applying renaissance principles to today's complex economic landscape, Get Back in the Box: Innovation from the Inside Out. He's now writing a monthly comic book for Vertigo called Testament.

He has written and hosted two award-winning Frontline documentaries - The Merchants of Cool looked at the influence of corporations on youth culture, and The Persuaders, about the cluttered landscape of marketing, and new efforts to overcome consumer resistance.

Rushkoff's commentaries air on CBS Sunday Morning and NPR's All Things Considered, and have appeared in publications from The New York Times to Time magazine. He wrote the first syndicated column on cyberculture for The New York Times and Guardian of London, as well as a column on wireless for The Feature and a new column for the music and culture magazine, Arthur.

Rushkoff founded the Narrative Lab at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program, and lectures about media, art, society, and change at conferences and universities around the world.

He is Advisor to the United Nations Commission on World Culture, on the Board of Directors of the Media Ecology Association, The Center for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics, and as a founding member of Technorealism. He has been awarded Senior Fellowships by the Markle Foundation and the Center for Global Communications Fellow of the International University of Japan.

He regularly appears on TV shows from NBC Nightly News to Larry King and Bill Maher. He is writing a new monthly comic book for Vertigo, and developed the Electronic Oracle software series for HarperCollins Interactive.

Rushkoff is on the board of several new media non-profits and companies, and regularly consults on new media arts and ethics to museums, governments, synagogues, churches, and universities, as well as Sony, TCI, advertising agencies, and other Fortune 500 companies.

Rushkoff graduated magna cum laude from Princeton University, received an MFA in Directing from California Institute of the Arts, a post-graduate fellowship (MFA) from The American Film Institute, and a Director's Grant from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. He has worked as a certified stage fight choreographer, and as keyboardist for the industrial band PsychicTV.

He lives in Park Slope Brooklyn with his wife, Barbara, and daughter Mamie.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Witty, Erudite Look At Channel Surfing Culture, April 19, 1999

By 

Alex Burns (Melbourne, Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Playing the Future: How Kids' Culture Can Teach Us to Thrive in an Age of Chaos (Hardcover)

After the success of 'Media Virus' (1994), the pressure was on emminent cultural critic Douglas Rushkoff to deliver the goods with a powerful follow-up.

'Playing The Future' (released as 'Children of Chaos' elsewhere) has many intriguing topic including the study of Dungeons & Dragons and VR; Youth Subcultures (Goth, Skateboarding, Television, Computer Games); the longterm effects of new media shows; and the rise of Attention Deficit Disorders. Rushkoff dares to suggest with the last that they may be useful as 'coping strategies' for the postmodern era of the individual drenched in UV ray computer monitor glows.

'Playing The Future' was marred by publisher errors that saw the book not promoted much in the U.S., although it was well received elsewhere. There was also an inevitable backlash against Rushkoff when a comment regarding a US$7500/hour fee from a single seminar was mentioned offhand during an interview and then promoted as Rushkoff selling out Generation X secrets to faceles trans-national monoliths. Rushkoff had forseen the growth of the Internet in 1989 and delivered much early ground-breaking work on cyberculture.

These public debates do not diminish the power of 'Playing The Future', which is crisply written and features many unique insights into the rise of Youth Culture and the future trajectory path of the Humanities. Rushkoff is not scared to take on institutions such as the conservative factions of the Christian Church and show that they are failing to adjust to the needs of youth in the contemporary environment.

'Playing The Future' will be re-released in late 1999 as 'Children of Chaos' within the United States. Rushkoff's insights and arguments have largely been on-track since the book's initial release.

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Channel surfing the planet with a witty genius friend, February 17, 1998

By 

G. Codrington "graeme codrington" (London) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Playing the Future: How Kids' Culture Can Teach Us to Thrive in an Age of Chaos (Hardcover)

The blurb on the back of hardcover version of this book really says it all: This book is "like channel surfing the planet with a witty genius friend who can explain the pattern that connects it all together" (Mark Frauenfelder, Online editor, Wired magazine).

The book is reads like a compilation of short sections, each of which deals with an issue to do with our current culture. Since he is a media analyst, much of Rushkoff's emphasis is on the media and modern technology. His contention is that the world of today and the future is changing rapidly. We are moving from the Machine Age to the Information Age, and much of this move is being driven by the media, and underpinned by changing technologies. Many older people are afraid of these changes and are doing all within their power to stop or at least slow it down, and are lamenting the change in attitudes and involvement of young people.

Rushkoff contends that we are disadvantaging young people today by not allowing this technology to develop and impact our lives, and that by fighting against it, we are diminishing the ability of our children to survive in the new world. He has an evolutionary basis of thought, believing that technology is the key to a new jump in man's evolutionary development. Although we may not agree with him on this point, whether we believe in evolution or not, we must agree with his assessment of the future - that the world is changing very rapidly and is not the same place it used to be. We need to adapt and change in order just to survive, let alone successfully manage the future.

Rushkoff looks at issues such as snowboarding, skateboarding, comics, movies, Star Trek, Barney, Dungeons and Dragons and other role-playing games, Goths culture, the media, video games, the Internet, UFO abductions, and many other examples of modern culture and it's effects.

In each of these views of issues, he highlights how the issue demonstrates the shift from the Machine Age to the Information Age, and how it shows the need for less structural controls and more "grass roots level" involvement of people. He maintains that "chaos" is the only legitimate basis for the new culture. By this, he means an organismic interaction between people, by means of technologically advanced equipment. The Internet provides the best example of how communities of like minded individuals will develop and self-regulate their activities. This is his view of how all structure within society should work, from government, to media and everything. We need to be free of all restraints and governance from above.

Whether this optimistic view of humanity's ability to do this is well-founded or not, as Christians there is much good to be gained by an analysis of Rushkoff's work. He often refers to the church, and correctly points out the weaknesses of the existing church in the new era of chaos. He even has some good ideas for churches. But his book's value is that it helps us to put practical examples onto our understanding of a changing youth culture. His book provides valuable material for analysis of modern youth culture, and for planning short to medium term strategies for the future. It also provides those who want to change with some good counter-arguments against the nay-sayers and those afraid of the future.

This is a well researched book, which I thoroughly enjoyed reading.

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Inspiring ideas about the media-culture we are living in, October 12, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: Playing the Future: How Kids' Culture Can Teach Us to Thrive in an Age of Chaos (Hardcover)

Beside some the One-Thing-Ideas (e.g. in context with holography)and some strange humanistic ideas, mainly at the end of the book, it is extremely inspiring and gives unconventional ideas and thoughts about the culture we are living in. Many things like TV or politics or the combination between technics and human culture are seen from a vital counterpoint - just in contrary to usual moralistic opinion.