-Jurassic Park: The Lost World
With all the positive discussion of entertainment and 'fun' becoming the major economic driver of the world, I can't help but wish there was more distinction in what constitutes what one might call 'healthy' fun, as compared to 'degenerative' fun. Either can support a booming economy, but only one can improve the quality of life.
Degenerative fun, I believe, constitutes the majority of the entertainmentization that supports our economy today. This includes events like gambling, strip clubs, television, certain video games, 'leisure' shopping, NASCAR, and perhaps several other sports. I group these together saying that, for the most part, they all occupy time in a manner that not only doesn't improve one's life, but can actually detract from it. All of these have the potential for pretty awful addiction as well, and the results can be devastating. Gambling can bankrupt you, leisure shopping can lead you to rely on material goods for all of your life's satisfaction, television can occupy your time to the point where you're essentially hibernating in your free time, there are video games that desensitize you to truly gruesome violence and make it fun, and NASCAR is just generally wasteful of resources. Given, one can argue that all of these events have a positive social dimension that people are able to bond over and therefore that's positive, but people can bond and be social over just about anything, like um, squirrel slaughter.
On the side of what I would call 'healthy' fun, I would include a number of obvious items like exercise and visiting family for vacations, and some that can potentially overlap with the degenerative ones. Our generation is a visual generation, and there are television shows that are extremely educational, from National Geographic, to PBS Kids Shows (who didn't learn good moral values from Arthur?). I would even argue shows like 'The Daily Show' are healthy, in the respect that they are intelligently written and teach a lot about politics and the inherent problems with the global economy, just through a humorous lense. There are video games coming out these days, such as 'Spore', that are essentially going to be teaching Maya to kids in addition to the evolution of biology from single-celled organisms to entire galaxies. It's another product by Will Wright, maker of The Sims, which just so happened to be a factor for me (and others) deciding I was interested in designing architecture. More and more video games these days teach you wonderful things, from problem-solving to history without even making you think you're learning. Why? Because you're having fun. This is also how I felt visiting The Bodies exhibit while I was in Florida for break. The amount I learned from this visual, two hour excursion into the human body was equal to if not greater than everything I learned from a boring textbook in high school; and I had fun doing it.
This brings up the issue of the UEC, and how much more effective it is to bring fun events to people instead of making them travel. We prefer quicker doses of gratification and leisure, and it fits in our schedule easier. I'm now realizing in retrospect that over the course of doing the four readings for this week (in one session), I took eight different very short breaks, used up by youtube, facebook, guitar, and eating. How strange it is to think that 'eating' becomes thought of as a leisure activity purely because it's not spent doing 'productive' work, but merely fulfilling an instinct. Many of us in Architecture tend to think of sleeping the same way, and we can easily find ourselves feeling guilty for getting eight hours of sleep, thinking about the work that we could've gotten done if we had limited ourself to four. If we're considered a multitasking generation now, I'm frightened to think of the capabilities our children will have. Imagine no internet lag, never having to dial a phone number, never having to cook, everything activated by speech and simple hand gestures absolutely instantly...crazy stuff.
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