Amazon.co.uk Review
Three years after the original publication of
Playing the Future: What We Can Learn from Digital Kids, in 1996, this breathlessly polemical defence of the techno-savvy youth culture of the '90s already reads like a document from another era. Back then, the Internet was still a strange new force, instinctively embraced by kids who'd grown up playing video games, instinctively distrusted by the grown-ups who ran the mainstream media. Standing up for the emergent digital culture--loosely associated with suspicious activities like raves, role-playing games, and piercing--took nerve and optimism.
And Douglas Rushkoff here supplies both in abundance. His argument: contemporary "screenagers," as he calls them, aren't being warped by new technologies, they're adapting to them. Their relationships to play, work, spirituality and politics all reflect the contours of a new world shaped by the liberating logic of digital networks and chaos theory. It's a better world, Rushkoff assures us, and if the grown-ups know what's good for them, they will stop looking askance at the ways of digital youth and start trying to learn from them instead.
Ultimately, Rushkoff seems a lot more interested in making his argument than in making it stick. He flies from one loose logical connection to another--the secret link
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