Play as the Main Event in International and UK Culture
First published in Cultural Trends, April 2003Play has become a dominant trend in the culture of Western adults. This chapter of Cultural Trends looks at its prevalence and growth
Read the FULL article by clicking on the link at the end of this abstract.
Play has become a dominant trend in the culture of Western adults. This chapter of Cultural Trends looks at its prevalence and growth. The first section briefly discusses what play is. The second provides an overview of playful varieties of leisure in the US and worldwide, and sums up some of the main trends that have emerged. The third follows the same method in relation to the UK. The fourth section looks at the increasing incidence of play at work, while the final section draws conclusions from the evidence presented. Throughout, special attention is played to the role of information technology in play. Five industries are covered extensively – computer games; gambling; sport; performing arts; and fairs, theme parks and adventure holidays.
Attendance at, participation in and paid employment in play constitute three levels of engagement in it. This chapter tries to measure these levels of engagement by bringing together just some of the vast but disparate literature and statistics on play. The range of sources drawn upon is varied. Inspired by the perspectives of writers in economics, politics, sociology and technology, this chapter uses official government data, and data taken from the business press, to illustrate its ideas.
The chapter asks and answers the following three questions:
- Does play provide spaces and moments of freedom that, fortunately enough, lie beyond the grasp of market forces?
- Is the entertainment provided by play genuinely educational, or does absorption in play instead represent a degraded notion of the Self?
- By favouring mass attendance at, mass participation in and mass employment in playful activities, have UK government policies advanced the cause of culture – or have they set it back?
Open and download the Full PDF version of article by clicking on this Play as the Main Event link.
Innovators I like
Robert Furchgott – discovered that nitric oxide transmits signals within the human body
Barry Marshall – showed that the bacterium Helicobacter pylori is the cause of most peptic ulcers, reversing decades of medical doctrine holding that ulcers were caused by stress, spicy foods, and too much acid
N Joseph Woodland – co-inventor of the barcode
Jocelyn Bell Burnell – she discovered the first radio pulsars
John Tyndall – the man who worked out why the sky was blue
Rosalind Franklin co-discovered the structure of DNA, with Crick and Watson
Rosalyn Sussman Yallow – development of radioimmunoassay (RIA), a method of quantifying minute amounts of biological substances in the body
Jonas Salk – discovery and development of the first successful polio vaccine
John Waterlow – discovered that lack of body potassium causes altitude sickness. First experiment: on himself
Werner Forssmann – the first man to insert a catheter into a human heart: his own
Bruce Bayer – scientist with Kodak whose invention of a colour filter array enabled digital imaging sensors to capture colour
Yuri Gagarin – first man in space. My piece of fandom: http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/10421
Sir Godfrey Hounsfield – inventor, with Robert Ledley, of the CAT scanner
Martin Cooper – inventor of the mobile phone
George Devol – 'father of robotics’ who helped to revolutionise carmaking
Thomas Tuohy – Windscale manager who doused the flames of the 1957 fire
Eugene Polley – TV remote controls
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