Edited by Pat Kane

Appropriate to begin this journal with news of a US book that takes a rather underdeveloped view of play - ie, play=leisure - and quite rightly gets slated for it. Jonathan Rauch's Washington Post review of The Importance of Being Lazy: In Praise of Play, Leisure, and Vacations, by Al Jini (Amazon ref) is the best I've found so far. He begins by quoting Jini:

"As a society, we are obsessed with time. We have always been so; it's part of our national character. In this society, time is money and we always try to spend it well. We fail to understand and often scoff at the tradition of the siesta in Italy, Spain, and Mexico. We smirk at the French practice of closing down in August and Sweden's mandated five-week minimum vacation policy. We have never been comfortable with the abstract notion of free time. It is not in our nature to just let time pass. Unstructured time, dead time, downtime, wasted time -- makes us ill at ease."

Rauch continues:

This is basically true, but it's more complicated than that. We are at once a nation of workaholics and a nation of couch potatoes. We do work too much -- especially white-collar upwardly mobile strivers in businesses such as technology, the law, the media and finance. But statistics that show Americans taking relatively little vacation time are misleading; they supply an imperfect measure of how we take our leisure, because ours is a culture drenched in entertainment.

Whether entertainment as we experience it equals leisure no doubt is debatable, but we have so completely blurred the line between work and play that it often is very hard to tell which is which. The war coverage from Iraq on the cable television news channels proved the point. On the one hand, a lot of hard work was being done by correspondents in the field, and bearing witness to the grimmer images from the war was work of sorts for television viewers as well; yet the way in which the news was presented (especially on cable channels) was entertainment pure and simple -- flashy graphics, blow-dried anchors, melodramatic music, "Gong Show" debates. It's not for nothing that television news people usually refer to their programs as "shows."

No, we probably don't allow ourselves enough vegging-out time at the pool or on the beach, but on the other hand we have to make a real effort if we want to escape all those people trying to entertain us for one reason or another.

Rauch makes a standard point here: that work and leisure are often mirror-twins, the soft regimentations of the latter "re-creating" us for the hard regimentations of the former. Separate play from leisure, and reinstitute its much wider, more energetic and power-laden connotations - play-as-power, play-as-imagination, play-as-chaos - and "play" begins to encompass "work" as well as leisure. Analyze the "showtime" of entertainment culture from a play-ethical view-point, and you have to start distinguishing one-way culture from two-way (and multi-way) culture: a night's couch potato-dom gawping at the last Gulf War spectacle, versus a few hours blogging and surfing at browser, both making and receiving meaning.

The very least that mature play-thinking does is to problematise the very duality of work-leisure. What exactly do we mean by creativity and productivity these days: where, and when, and under what conditions, do we think it really happens? What is the real "value" of a playful opening-out of possibilities - whether at home, in the workplace, in the street? If a "player" is just as active and engaged an agent in the world as a "worker", shouldn't we begin to fashion institutions and organisations that support the passionate, imaginative activity that is play? Or are we always fated, in the words of writers like Richard Florida and Charles Leadbeater, to impose 19th century structures on 21st century energies?

More questions than answers here. Cue the comments page...