Pat Kane

Bio

Pat Kane, 45, is a musician, writer, consultant and activist. His book The Play Ethic (Macmillan 2004, and see www.theplayethic.com) has been praised by figures like Will Hutton, Charles Leadbeater, Daniel Pink and Douglas Ruskhoff. His band Hue And Cry (www.hueandcry.co.uk) have supported Madonna, U2, James Brown, and Van Morrison and Al Green, and their thirteenth album Open Soul was released in 2008. Pat writes for the Guardian and Independent, and was a founding editor of The Sunday Herald. He has consulted for organisations as diverse as Lego, Nokia, the Cabinet Office and Bartle Bogle Hegarty about the power and potential of play, and is a regular global keynote speaker on this topic.

Abstract

Taking Reality Lightly: Play and the Constitution of the Net

In scholarly debates about the nature of our interactions (or 'digital labors') on socio-technical networks, play is often invoked as a descriptor or modifier of existing behaviour. But rarely is there any deeper connection made between the multi-disciplinary zone of contemporary play scholarship – particularly in biology, ethology, neuroscience and complexity theory – and the constitutive forces that maintain (despite various enclosures) the openness and creativity of the internet society. This paper will explore these connections, and claim that the age of informational plenitude has disclosed a socio-biological 'ground of play', or generic capacities of potentiation, that might explain the enduring resilience and inventiveness of cyberculture. The paper will also draw on the author's direct and daily experience as a web enterpreneur in music and journalism. This will illustrate how the constitutively playful structure of the Net, and its ambiguous and open social dynamics, shapes the development of network enterprises at least as crucially as commercial or governmental forces.