Generation Playstation and TheirSpace
15th February, 2007Saint Valentine’s day saw the pre-release ordering for the Playstation 3 in the UK. What a lovely gift! However the cost is somewhat shocking. You can only buy in bundles. HMV are offering a bundle for £675 ($1300) – but you get a PSP thrown in at that price. This raises interesting questions “who are the Playstation generation?” - folks with a lot of disposable income?
This morning I was reading in a DEMOS report on young people and social software: Their Space. In most ways this is a useful and thought provoking document and well worth any educator’s attention however one particular myth keeps on propagating and it re-appears here:
“We live in an intellectual climate where most people over school age are uncomfortable with the growing presence of digital technologies.”
I do not think that SONY agrees. They have a very clear 25+ demographic – and many of the purchasers would be people who used Speccies and Commodore 64s. The myth of adult fear and lack of understanding needs to be challenged as it distorts analysis.
MySpace becomes eulogised as a youth phenomenon – disruptive and a youth driven challenge. We ought to be wary of such an analysis. The fact that News International own MySpace does not appear in the Demos report. The ownership is salient. It is possible to conceive of MySpace not as a youth movement but as a very clever tool for advertising and control of markets – to see Lilly Allen not as some anti-business heroin but as a well managed and groomed pop-star – only using a different mechanism from Simon Cowell. For the backers and creators of Web 2.0, it is about “the money”. The systems are not created and managed by young people. Any analysis of social software (including the one I wrote last year) should begin to address ownership of these sites and the motivations of the owners in investing in and setting up these sites. I do not want to sound too harsh – there are some stunning tools out there and they do enable people to be creative and share. However they are not just the preserve of the young and the fact that “old” people intend to make money out of these tools need to be part of the analysis.
Meanwhile back with the PS3 pre-orders (cos grown ups want fun too) – according to PS3Finder the cheapest buys are £429. Bundles come with car racing and first person games. It is a shame there are no format-leaping announcements. Thank heavens for the Nintendo Wii – a real contribution to social hardware.
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Bob Harrison
Ben Williamson
Dan Sutch
Richard Sandford
Leon Cych
Martin Owen
Tim Reader
March 7th, 2007 at 2:01 pm
[...] Another big report… “Their Space” March 7th, 2007 Found this via the Futurelab Flux blog. Demos (a UK think-tank) produced an 80 page (large print!) report on “Education for a Digital Generation“. Initially I thought this was going to be a hyper-bolic celebration of digital-youth, but it keeps a balanced perspective. Material criticising the myths found in mass-media hysteria on the ill-effects of digital media is balanced with a critique of the utopian counter view-point (page 41) : There is also a set of positive myths demonstrating ‘blind faith’ in the power of technology. The more extreme versions caricature a whole generation of young people as digital natives and cyberkids, all equally confident users of technology. Meanwhile, staunch defenders of gaming and web 2.0 risk presenting all digital practices as equally valuable, hailing each wave of technology as full of revolutionary potential. [...]