Play,mobilityandlearning

PAT KANE

A discussion paper for Urban Learning Space[1]

20 January 2005

There is a recurrent image fromThe Matrixmovie trilogywhich can easily stand for the relationship between the body, mobility, information networks and the city. Three ghostly characters, seemingly composed of light, stand in a hallway, which is itself only visible as light traces. In the paranoid world-view of the movie itself, this represens the digital truth behind the simulated reality of our experience.

But the image also works, more prosaically, as an evocation of the ubiquity of our connection to data-flows in our physical environments. This data is above, below and beside us, taking its oblique pathways through our hallways and streets. Yet in the image, we are the densest sources of data, both for the information we receive and we transmit. For all the pervasiveness and power of the info-matrix, the actions and intentions of humans are still the most solid entities in this universe.[2]

This emphasis on human agency within networks is what a consideration of play – its forms and propensities, its culture and psychobiology - can bring to any socio-technical environment. The concept of an ‘Urban Learning Space’ – a city environment in which understanding, wisdom and knowledge accrue, through various systems of learning – is worth examining through a variety of analytical lenses. The notion that a city might provide a meaningful experience through play and players – that is, through games, simulations, rituals, acts of the imagination, energetic mobility – has a long tradition in European culture: from the Medieval religious carnivals to the anti-G8 ‘carnivals against capitalism’; from conceptual artists shaping pedestrian perceptions, to runners and skateboarders transforming inert streets.

Yet the ‘meaningful mobility’ that play implies is now enriched by a geninuely new dimension of our daily life in cities: that is, the ever-more-pervasive networks of information and connection that individuals can access as they wish, when they wish, through their own portable, or publicly accessible devices. Whether using mobile phones, or wireless laptops, or the coming ‘everyware’ of sensor and radio-transmitting technology, we move (like the Matrix characters) through a world of increasing, yet never always explicit connectivity.

The question of agency, and thus our identities as actors in the urban environment, then becomes crucial. This paper will begin to draw some connections between play, mobility, and learning, in order to answer a general question for ULS: how should one live and thrive inside an ‘urban learning space’? And specifically: what can the practice of play and the experience of the player bring to this?

PLAY

Play means more than fun (and more than not-work, too)

'Play' has become a fascinating term within a spread of public discourses in the UK around the crisis of work. This crisis is phrased not just in the terms of the usual official 'top-down' anxieties about national productivity or output, but also a 'bottom-up' disquiet about work and its social and psychological toll: a crisis of the 'work ethic' itself. Madeleine Bunting's Willing Slaves revealed the statistic that more production days have been lost to 'sickies' in the 90's than were lost to militant industrial action in the 70's: she calls this an 'individualised mass protest' against an 'overwork culture'.[3] As some reviews have pointed out, and as Bunting admits, the perception of an oppressive work culture is not uniform across social levels or occupations (eg, managerial-professional hours may be longer, but there is more part-time working too[4]).

But the rise of 'happiness' research over the last few years - specifically the new nexus between economics and psychology - reminds us that any crisis around commitment to work takes place within a much broader set of anomalies[5]. The flatlining of life-satisfaction values against the steady rise of GDP in the UK, for example, is only one indicator of a general Western trend towards 'post-materialist' values - emphasising quality of life, personal rights and self-expression over economic gain.[6] A 'politics of well-being' has become something of a truism among the mainstream European political establishments. Yet it undoubtedly acknowledges the increasing scepticism of their voters about the automatic validity of 'producing-to-consume' as a model for an active, self-determining life.[7]

Play, and the figure of the 'player', occupies a curious and not immediately comprehensible position within these debates and trends. In line with the Puritan legacy, play is often entirely equated with leisure, recreation and relationships: a Nov 2004 international NOP poll on "work-play balance" defined play as "watching TV, reading, socializing with friends and spending time with children and grandchildren."[8] Even when play becomes visible and discussible within a progressive policy agenda, it is characterised as either a driver for a passionate, though largely leisure-based amateurism (Demos's recent pamphlet on the Pro-Am Revolution[9]), or as "a pathway to public debate" about "the role of fun and enjoyment" in social relationships and "personal wellbeing"[10].

Of course, an aspect of play is about fun and enjoyment, pleasurable autonomy and personal gratification. Indeed, it is that free and egoistic play - a subject fully in control of their space and time, able to explore his or her will and desire - that the industrial-Puritan legacy is most keen to literally demonise ('the soul's play-day is the devil's work-day', 'the devil makes work for idle hands', etc). Yet we have to acknowledge that the social semantics of play, as they actually exist in the English-speaking world, are much more diverse than this.

If we explore the core semantics of play, we can begin to understand why play escapes from the corral of leisure and non-work, and becomes a diverse indicator of change and process. From its roots in the Indo-European -dlegh, and the old English pleg(i)an, play takes the definitions of 'movement, exercise, engagement'. (The core scholarship on play indicates that the very plurality of play's forms is an 'adaptive potentiation' - a spinning-out of possibilities and strategies by social mammals, in order to survive and thrive with their fellow subjects. This elemental diversity may explain why 'play' and 'player' appear in contexts that are very far from the leisurely and recreational.[11])

Do a word search on "play + business" or "play + politics" on Google News ( for example, and a whole world of play-as-movement-and-engagement appears. There are software giants and their "innovation plays", entrepreneurs putting sectors "into play". This matches well with one of the OED definitions, play as "the state of being active, operative and effective", or play as "light and constantly changing movement" - almost a perfect encapsulation of the nature of information-age enterprise.

The "players" in a power context (whether politics or money, technology or bureaucracy) are equally well-described by these core definitions. Politicians, for example, both make their "plays" to their constituencies, but also wonder how their policies will "play with them" - meaning, how will this public rhetoric be received, or understood? In an entirely different realm to official politics and markets, a search on the words "hip-hop" and "playa" (the African-American spelling of "player") render up a surprisingly similar definition of player's agency. The "playa" occupies the ghetto or street, and is involved in the grey-to-black economy of clubs, music, drugs and sex. Yet this player is as obsessed with "being active, operative and effective" - and moving quickly with it - as any overground politician or business leader.

This brief journey round the social semantics of "play" and "player" - testable from any web browser - is hopefully enough to make the point about the complex and ambiguous resonance of these terms in public discourse. If play is not merely trivial escape and indulgence, nor even just a component of a quality-of-life/wellbeing agenda, but also a principle of movement and engagement that applies across business, politics and subculture (as well as more predictably sports and the arts), then we should invoke it with precision and delicacy. In the context of this paper, it would be especially careless to reduce or trivialise play in the context of both mobility, and learning - particularly when the expanded definition could so interestingly enrich both terms.

PLAY AND MOBILITY

Play is almost as old as the mammalian record, and mobile phones/mobile computing are together barely two decades old. Yet in terms of play's deepest semantics, the principle of movement and engagement would seem to unite both biological capability, and technological object.

Yet it's salutary to remember that mobile communication, in the most basic sense, began in a military context: Marconi selling his wireless telegraphy to the British Royal Navy in 1900. As the historian of the mobile phone Jon Agar notes, "the first mobile radio was restricted to behemoths" - only a battleship had the spare power to drive the sets, and the strategic need to co-ordinate a fleet. The next significant developments - two-way radios in Detroit's police cars in 1928 - again highlight the roots of wireless mobility in surveillance, team coordination, and a battleground of contending forces, actual or potential.[12]

When we observe the contemporary use of electronic tagging of young criminals under probation - each person fitted with a Global Positioning Satellite bracelet, tracking their movements precisely, which they cannot remove for the duration of their sentence - the command-and-control elements of wireless networks would seem to be very much alive.[13]

Yet it is fascinating to note that so much of the cutting-edge design research on mobility - which I sampled at a recent symposium in Vancouver, organised by Nokia Futures - involves a conscious use of mobile urban gaming: where city centres or suburbias are used as the gameboard, where human subjects armed with GPS, Bluetoothed or wireless handhelds are the players, and where the rules are encoded in collaborative software and shared interfaces on each device.

More on these later: but suffice to note the rather poignant mirror image - nearly 80 years after Detroit's finest roamed the streets, wirelessly enabled to report on trouble, hordes of design students are now drifting through cities, wirelessly enabled to make some trouble (or at least trouble some perceptions).

Open innovation commons: building the grounds of (mobile) play

One of the major questions facing an urban learning project, in the face of ubi-comp and wireless mobility, is that of the openness of the available networks. Compared to the internet, the mobile web as manifested through cell-phone carriers is already a much more commodified domain - with information downloadable through customised windows that ensure a micropayment for each downloaded item (from text messages to video clips).

Over the last few years, wi-fi has developed a much more mixed economy - with a combination of highly-branded wireless service-providers in business and urban contexts (T mobile, BT Openzone); community activists making a virtue of providing free wireless access (see Consume.net in UK, and Bryant Park in New York); and some city municipalities in Europe and the US creating civic wireless zones, available either free to locals and visitors, or as a rate-payers amenity.[14]

Those who are thinking seriously in local government about an agenda for urban learning, and its relationship to ubi-comp, will have to address the thorny question of what model of mobile network access to promote. This goes beyond the usual arguments about e-inclusion - the financial-capital or cultural-capital barriers to access - and points towards the deeper issue of what values and potentials are released by the very design of these networks. How much mass innovation might they engender, or suppress? The author of Smart Mobs, Howard Rheingold, has recently proposed a "Mobile and Open Manifesto". In this, he wonders about the vested interests that might strangle real and transformative developments in mobility:

The devices that most people on earth will carry or wear in coming decades could become platforms for technical and entrepreneurial innovation, foundations for industries that don't exist yet, enablers of social and political change. However, it is far from certain that mobile media will go the route of the PC, where teenage dropouts like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and millions of others actively shaped the technology. Or the internet, where search engines were invented in dorm rooms and innovators like Tim Berners-Lee gave away the World Wide Web for free without asking permission or changing the wiring.

Powerful interests recognise the dangers such a world poses for business models that depend on controlling and metering access to content, conduit, or services for a mass market, and they are acting to protect their interests.[15]

Rheingold goes on to list five points on his manifesto, 'in order for mobile media to benefit those who don't already own an ICT cartel'. The two most interesting, in terms of a vision of play, are 'that people are free and able to act as users not consumers', and 'an open innovation commons'.

If "users can actively shape media, as they did with the PC and Internet, not just passively consume what is provided by a few, as in the era of broradcast media and communications monopolies", says Rheingold, then "users will be free to invent" - by hacking hardware, and tinkering with unlocked software (as in open source). What this emphasis on users rather than consumers will enrich is the 'open innovation commons', which Rheingold glosses this way: "When networks of devices, technological platforms for communication media, the electromagnetic spectrum, are available for shared experimentation, new technologies and industries can emerge".

If a vision of the mobile web inspired by the ideals of the internet - based on 'inventive users, playing on an open innovation commons' - is accepted, then there are clear development and infrastructure choices to be made by urban policy-makers. In terms of these principles, the optimum arrangement for mass innovation in ubi-comp would be a civically free wi-fi network (aware of the progress towards the much more powerful Wi-Max frequencies), with some degree ofinfrastructural support for networked devices (a proliferation of electricity points in 'third spaces' like cafes, public plazas, etc, a strong local sellers' market for wi-fi devices and add-ons), as well as acoherent wireless city portal and brand,to raise awareness of the benefits of ubi-comp for social, cultural and economic dynamism.

From a play-ethical perspective - that is, a conception of 'players' as urban subjects with optimal autonomy and awareness - this model of an open mobile network is most appropriate. Its transparency, genuine ubiquity and civic inclusiveness guarantees the greatest number of players ('teenage dropouts' included), empowered to turn built urban spaces into places of genuine interactive possibility - from art and music production/consumption/distribution, through issue activism, to other forms of private and public enterprise.

Yet end-to-end public wifi networks, linking browser-enabled devices, are of course not the only available socio-technical 'architectures of value' (to use Lawrence Lessig's term) Many of the more cutting-edge mobile researchers and developers are beginning to see the darkside of ubi-comp.

As Adam Greenfield puts it, if the new schema for internet addressing, IPv6, can genearate some 6.5x1023 addresses for every square metre on the surface of the planet, then every object with a transmitter (from the cheapest radio-frequency chip to full GPS) will be able to communicate with every other object.[16] This will be 'everyware', as Greenfield puts it - and a potential disaster for our notion of privacy and free movement. What 'play' or space of possibility could there be in our lives, when our every interaction and transaction can feed into an 'insinuative grid' of locatable and trackable information - stretching from the very surface of the body to a public space fitted with the relevant receptors?

Greenfield wisely notes that protests about the surveillant powers of ubiquitous systems, and their potential for authoritarian social engineering, may not find the audience they expect: "Many, many people like the idea that they're always being watched, because they equate that watching with always being cared for... If the most accepted model for pervasive devices to date has been the Assistant, we should never forget that a competing model - one that holds strong appeal for a great many people - is the Superintendant."[17]

Certainly, many of the principles and manifestos arising out of considerations of mobility agree on one point. The information gathered by our ubi-comp devices should be, as Greenfield puts it, 'self-disclosing' and 'deniable' - with provisions for immediate and transparent querying of ownership, use, capabilities, information relevant to each device, and the ability to opt out of systems at any point. As Alan Munro's ULS paper, and other authorities have said, there is always the possibility of a sousveillance - a 'watching from below' of the operations of power and authority, with recording and location devices becoming a new kind of mobile investigative media. This power play - the agonistic clash of forces in a polis - is as old as human society itself: we should expect that there will be those who resist existing authority with all expressive means at their disposal, no matter how oppressive or inclusive the regime.