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A podcast from the Digital Futures Institute at Teachers College, Columbia University about play and pop culture. Professors Haeny Yoon and Nathan Holbert talk with educators, parents and kids about how they play in their work and their lives, and why play and pop culture matter.
The views expressed in this podcast are solely those of the speaker to whom they are attributed. They do not necessarily reflect the views of the faculty, administration, staff or Trustees either of Teachers College or of Columbia University.
Nathan Holbert:
Welcome to Pop & Play, the podcast all about play and pop culture and how it shapes our lives. I'm Nathan Holbert, and with me, as always, is Haeny, King of late night, Yoon.
Haeny Yoon:
Yeah. Okay. I'm Haeny Yoon. Today is our last episode of a very full season.
Nathan Holbert:
Aren't you sad?
Haeny Yoon:
Yes, a little bit. We've initially planned about eight episodes and then delivered 18 or something like that.
Nathan Holbert:
Something I appreciate.
Haeny Yoon:
It actually felt like 18 a little bit.
Nathan Holbert:
It probably felt like 28, 38.
Haeny Yoon:
Yes.
Nathan Holbert:
Well, we've talked a lot about various topics this season. We've loosely been discussing play. We've talked about hobbies. We've talked about recreation, and we talked to both kids and adults about how they spend their time, how they like to play.
Haeny Yoon:
Yeah. We had a very interesting season about when play turns into a hobby, then turns the corner and ends up being something that we're obsessed about. I remember you hark into Mimi Ito's book about Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out. I feel like that's a good thematic thing throughout our guest center season. It's just like, when do we move from hanging out to messing around and then to full on geeking out? And those definitions change and might be malleable.
Nathan Holbert:
Absolutely. It's all play, but it's play of all sorts of different forms, right?
Haeny Yoon:
Yes. Yeah.
Nathan Holbert:
As we were thinking about kind of a way to wrap this season up, this conversation that we've been having for the year up, we thought we might talk a little bit about what have we learned about what play is by spending all this time engaging in play with friends, with adults with kids, right?
Haeny Yoon:
Yes.
Nathan Holbert:
And to kick this conversation off, I stumbled across this article the other day that I shared with Haeny, and I think we both kind of had a reaction to it. You know what, this might be a good object for us to talk around today. So, this is an article called The Banal Horror of Jimmy Fallon. Sorry, I had to laugh when I was reading the title. It's by John Greenaway. We'll share the link in the show notes so other people can read it. But broadly this article is talking about the way in which the Jimmy Fallon show is kind of this artifact that represents a certain relationship to play. He talks about the Jimmy Fallon show as being mostly a series of social media clips. Social media is like length clips that-
Haeny Yoon:
Like sound bites.
Nathan Holbert:
Little sound bites, little like two minute, like one and a half minute clips that basically put celebrities into these kind of like repetitive games, right? And we can see some and laugh and whatever, but it's kind of this shtick that just continues on and on and on. And so here's a quote from the article. John Greenaway says, "These games are not true play in the revolutionary sense of the word, wherein games are unscripted, free and disruptive. Instead, they represent the total commodification of play. In a cultural landscape dominated by the attention economy and defined by precarious labor and existential dread, Fallon represents play not as an escape from work, but as an obligatory task that must be performed. A contractual obligation to a marketing team."
Haeny Yoon:
Ooh, burn.
Nathan Holbert:
That's a burn. Really throwing the fastball there.
Haeny Yoon:
Oh my God, I know. I remember when you shared that article with me, I went specifically to this paragraph and I remember telling you, I'm like, "I feel so vindicated right now." Because I feel like all semester I've been thinking about play, games, the relationship of play and games, the cultural practice of play, but then the design of play, the conditions of play, the idea of making play, but then also letting play happen. It's such a blurry line, right?
Nathan Holbert:
He is a kind of marketing vehicle for like, you're supposed to enjoy this now. He's laughing. Why aren't you?
Haeny Yoon:
Yeah. I remember back in the day when he was on SNL and every skit he would literally start laughing.
Nathan Holbert:
Always breaks. Always breaks.
Haeny Yoon:
And I feel like it was his shtick.
Nathan Holbert:
I mean, this actually isn't a pop off about Jamie Fallon, that we could probably do that. What I wanted to do, you actually used to slip the word in this semester, which maybe to give a little additional context here. So Haeny and I have been co-teaching a course this semester called Designing for Play and Learning here at Teachers College. It's been a lot of fun.
Haeny Yoon:
It has.
Nathan Holbert:
We got a crap ton of students in the course and they're all-
Haeny Yoon:
Really delightful students that have made us think a lot about different ideas about play.
Nathan Holbert:
Absolutely. Really thoughtful, really creative group. But because of that, this article this semester, I kind of want to maybe invite you, you started to already, but kick us off on how are we thinking about play? How are you thinking about play throughout all of these conversations we've been having?
Haeny Yoon:
Yeah. I feel like a shout-out to our class this semester that has been really eye-opening and very insightful. I think the thing that I learned this semester is to hold onto the idea of tensions and complexity and difference. And I feel like I've been trying to get myself to think about that, that not every question or not every dilemma needs to be solved or have a solution, but that it's worth the idea of thinking through some of those complexities and some of those things that might not have ready-made solutions, right? And I appreciate this article about the commodification of play, because I also have been thinking about like anything good or everything good always gets commodified.
Nathan Holbert:
Right.
Haeny Yoon:
Even naps get commodified.
Nathan Holbert:
Hey, I can make money on my naps.
Haeny Yoon:
Yeah. It's like something that we could do for free and everybody has access to taking a nap, but for some reason it has become commodified, right? I feel like everybody has found a way to make something marketable or make money off of it.
Nathan Holbert:
Yeah. How do you make money off naps? Do you make money off naps?
Haeny Yoon:
Yeah, you can write books about it.
Nathan Holbert:
Oh, that's right. There was that book. Yeah.
Haeny Yoon:
You could think about, you could take naps and the idea of rest into something that correlates with wellness and wellbeing and there's just so many things. I feel like it's even hard in this society to rest, because rest has a lot of things attached to it that you could do, which I am very privy to.
Nathan Holbert:
Yeah. Didn't you mention it, or somebody on our podcast mentioned this nap book.
Haeny Yoon:
Yeah, Nap Ministry, which I think is actually a really good book, right? So I feel like this is the tension, right? Because I feel like I get a lot of things out of that and I feel like the intention of the Nap Ministry book is not to commodify it. I think you could have that sense of it too, but I feel like the idea is that you want people to think in a complicated way about an idea, and that idea has to circulate somehow. And so what else?
Nathan Holbert:
Why not a book?
Haeny Yoon:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right.
Nathan Holbert:
Yeah, for sure.
Haeny Yoon:
Yeah. So I feel like I've been holding a lot of different tensions and questions in my head this semester, right? And I feel like I've had a lot of, you've heard me say, and the class has heard me say, "Oh my gosh, you guys had an epiphany." And some of my epiphanies have to do with like, our games really play, do I really enjoy the idea of games? Because I don't necessarily always love the idea of games and I feel like I kind of like put my flag in the hill and said like, "This is how I am." And then the next week we'll play a game and I'm like, "Oh, this is so fun." And so it's like this complicated thing where we aren't all one thing at one time. And so, I feel like anytime someone asks me to define play, every time someone asks me that question, it gets harder and harder for me to answer that.
Nathan Holbert:
Yep.
Haeny Yoon:
Yeah. So where do you stand on this? Because I want to know.
Nathan Holbert:
Well, the correct answer is, no, I mean, I'm with you. I resist definitions for things, which is, I don't know if that's just a reaction to your grad school days where you were constantly trying to define everything all the time and that was like a fun game that you could play and then eventually you reach a point where you realize that rarely are those definitions actually correct or useful. They start to become less and less useful the more refined they get, defined they get. But yeah, no, I think, I mean, I remember the conversation with [inaudible 00:08:34] about games and about why you didn't like them or why you did, what aspects of games you do like. And your favorite show right now is Traders, which is a game.
Haeny Yoon:
Long gone now. It's way out of the zeitgeist.
Nathan Holbert:
Okay. Well, this is how up to date I am on things.
Haeny Yoon:
But I love it. It is game. Yes, it's a game.
Nathan Holbert:
Yeah.
Haeny Yoon:
Yeah.
Nathan Holbert:
So, I think that conversation about what is and what is not a game and what distinguishes that from play was one that was really helpful for me this week, this, not week, this semester, this year. Yeah, I don't know. I think I may have dodged the actual question you asked, which was-
Haeny Yoon:
What is play?
Nathan Holbert:
How do I define play? Yeah. I don't know. I like when we talk about play as community, when we talk about play as a space for exploring new ideas, new spaces. I do like to think about the ways in which we design those spaces and design those opportunities for play, because that's where my brain likes to go, though I know that that's not a necessary feature or component of play, right?
Haeny Yoon:
Yeah. I mean, design is part of the conditions that could potentially facilitate play, right?
Nathan Holbert:
Certainly part of the conditions that I get excited about.
Haeny Yoon:
Yeah. Now that we're thinking back to this whole season of how we've been sort of edging and toeing the line between play and serious work or where those things blur and where those boundaries are, and maybe it is not useful to have boundaries around those things, right? Maybe that's a thing that we learned from it. What do you want people to take away from this season? Because ironically we started off with the idea of play as commodity, right?
Nathan Holbert:
Right. We started off with the Taylor Swift show, right?
Haeny Yoon:
Yeah. But then we spent a whole season where people have really internally sort of thought about and mobilized their own play, right? And I've heard all of our guests talk about like the affective emotional responses they have to this kind of play, right? That's not just about the things, but it's about the act of doing it. It's about the community that they're a part of, right? It's about how these actions bring them into like social, relational relationships with others. But there is a commodity to that, right? It wasn't easy to go to The Eras Tour, right? It's, I'm thinking about Brian Keller's $9,000 [inaudible 00:11:08] shame, right? I'm thinking about Emily's private lessons and all the things that go into the act of this sort of play, right? So, how do we square that?
Nathan Holbert:
Yeah, but not all of it is big dollars, right? I mean, we talked to a couple teachers who just brought a big dice into their classroom and then the kids are inventing and creating stories through that. The garden that we visited, John's garden is, I'm sure there's certainly some resources that are involved in creating that space, but you can garden, you can play in the dirt in all sorts of different ways without big dollars. Yeah, there is a commodification to all of it, but I think that-
Haeny Yoon:
Well, would you say commodification is just about the materiality of it, like the resource money part of it, or is it like, what if we expand this definition of commodifying something?
Nathan Holbert:
Sure, go ahead.
Haeny Yoon:
Like performance, or I don't know.
Nathan Holbert:
It's not just selling a product, it's also seeing play as content creation like we're doing right now.
Haeny Yoon:
Right, right, exactly, yes.
Nathan Holbert:
Yes. It's also playing as a way to perform an idea or perform that you're part of a group of people that do a thing. But yeah, I don't know. I mean, I think most of the people that we talk to, I would say all the people that we talked to about play very much resisted that commodification of what they do. And in fact, in some cases we asked about this, like are there tensions between your play as part of a hobby, as part of your enjoyment versus the kind of job of it, of doing it, or maybe it could become more than a hobby. And they all to a person was like, "No, I'm not going to do that. This is just for me. This is just for pleasure."
Haeny Yoon:
Yeah, yeah.
Nathan Holbert:
I think Brian Keller, who you mentioned, the woodworking episode is one really great example of that. We saw these incredible things that he created, and he was like, "No, no, no, this is just for me. This is just because I get pleasure out of thinking about the wood, touching the wood, shaping the wood, exploring the trees in my backyard." The question of like, what is the takeaway? I think that was one that really stuck with me is the ways in which these people that we had a chance to play with really saw these experiences as something other than a commodity.
Haeny Yoon:
Yeah, yeah. I think that's right too. I would be remiss to say that there are certain things or certain acts of play that are accessible and available to certain people, because they have the resources or they have the access or they have the entry in, or they have a backyard full of trees or something, right? And so, I feel like we'd be remiss to say that this kind of play is accessible to everyone, because it's not. But I do think that what you said is beyond just the stuff, right, beyond the commodification of it, beyond the structures that exist that people have to enter, that people stay in the game because there is this intrinsic feeling that they get from it, right? So that play is not just about the stuff, but it's also the feeling that people might get from it.
And so the feeling that you get from it might be ice skating across Rockefeller Center, or the feeling might be you sitting in your house watching Traders. I feel like there is a part, and I still think about like seasons ago when we had Mara and Chris and they were talking about theater. And she was saying how once that becomes her full time job there is like the potential and risk for that joy and the playfulness to get out of it, because then it becomes something very different.
And I feel like that has always stuck with me, and I feel like she just said that to me not just in that episode but way before, because I'm like, "Man, you're so good at this. You're such a great singer. You should do this for a living." And that becomes very different, and so I feel like that knowing where that edge sort of is, and I feel like that is really good advice to think about, right? When does this play, there's a part of this play that becomes something that is not just for performance for an outward thing, but it's for yourself. Yeah.
Nathan Holbert:
Yeah. So what do you get out of play, whether it's TV watching or other forms of play that you engage in, what are the things you take away from it? Why do you engage in it?
Haeny Yoon:
Yeah.
Nathan Holbert:
What makes it different than maybe what we're doing here here in the podcast [inaudible 00:15:54].
Haeny Yoon:
Yeah, because this is also fun.
Nathan Holbert:
Yeah, it is fun.
Haeny Yoon:
Yeah. Yeah. But what do I get out of TV watching?
Nathan Holbert:
I like that that's the only play I need.
Haeny Yoon:
I know. That's not the only play I do, okay? I like watching TV, and I think it's a, I don't know, it's a form of release, right? I think I've said this before, no one's trying to teach me anything, no one's trying to tell me what to do. I can do this on my own terms, that there is a point where I can start and there's a point where I can stop and no one's really surveilling my-
Nathan Holbert:
You can stop.
Haeny Yoon:
... movements potentially. I stop when I wish.
Nathan Holbert:
Theoretically I could stop watching.
Haeny Yoon:
And so maybe there is part of play that is about a big part of play that is about agency and having the freedom and the choice.
Nathan Holbert:
Oh yeah, for sure. Yeah. Yeah, I think for me, part of what I identify as the kind of zone of why I'm doing this thing, which maybe is video games or maybe it's going for a walk or for a run or something is there's very much a catharsis element to it for me where it's almost always like, I need a break, or I need to work this out, or I just need some time down from all the other stuff that I'm doing. And so that aspect of, sometimes it's joy obviously, but also this moment of kind of catharsis of being able to have an emotional release of some form or another is a big part of it for me as well.
Haeny Yoon:
Yeah. Yeah. I'm thinking back to Tim's book and how he was basically talking about this productivity metric, right? And that sometimes we think that to be more "productive" that we have to just work harder at something, rather than take ... I remember on my walk with him he was telling me that some days like on his writing day he'll just go fly-fishing for hours, and then be like, "Oh, okay, I guess it's one o'clock. No, I should start writing." But that something about that is necessary for him to be productive. And so, maybe there's something where we have to redefine what it means to be productive at something.
Nathan Holbert:
Yeah. That came up too, right? In his book he talked about the yo-yo-ing as well as a thing that's like, it's not about the number of minutes of yo-yo-ing that creates a certain number of minutes of productivity, but it is a necessary relationship between those two things.
Haeny Yoon:
Yeah, yeah. I feel like it's reframing how you're looking, right?
Nathan Holbert:
Yeah.
Haeny Yoon:
So, I feel like, okay, so here's the takeaway that I want people to have is, I really liked when Brian Keller was talking about a story that he had when he got really obsessed with black locusts, right? He would see them everywhere, his neighbors would be like, "There's Brian, he's looking for black locusts." And how he went to Seoul, Korea to conference and they were taking him out to go look at things and observe. And he kept noticing all these black locusts everywhere, even somewhere that was very far away. And I love the idea of like when you're really into something, it's almost like all you see is that. I remember in high school, I'm not really into cars, I was really into this like one car and I feel like every time I look on the highway-
Nathan Holbert:
Everywhere is that car.
Haeny Yoon:
I see it, yeah. But it's like not everybody suddenly had that car, right? It's like your mind is shifting and reframing to it. So that's why I brought the Book of Delight-
Nathan Holbert:
Book of Delights.
Haeny Yoon:
So Stan, you better read it. So, Book of Delights basically is this ... Ross Gay is this poet, he's like a noble laureate. He writes about like race and a lot of serious things that are happening in our political social landscape, right? But he decided on his birthday that he was going to, on his 40th birthday that he was going to write these like mini essays, essayets about delightful things that happened during the day, and he was going to do it every day.
And so he has this collection of delightful things that happen. And so he said that when he was starting this project of doing this Book of Delight that it wasn't like he had to search for, it was like he reframed his mind-
Nathan Holbert:
Just to start noticing it.
Haeny Yoon:
And to start noticing it, right? And I just love that idea is that once you really get into something, you start to notice things and start to reframe and shift how you think about the world and interact with it differently.
Nathan Holbert:
I had a delight with my kids this morning, having breakfast with them. It was a delight.
Haeny Yoon:
And what happened?
Nathan Holbert:
It just was a normal day, but it was just my kids sitting next to me, we're having breakfast together, and I think that's the ... I'm trying to learn from what you're pitching here. Because that's a thing every morning where it's like, "Okay, I got to get everybody breakfast. I got to make their lunches." And sometimes it's easy to miss that like, "Oh, this is really nice. I'm going to spend some time with this."
Haeny Yoon:
I've gotten really into making pour over coffees.
Nathan Holbert:
Yeah. Did you make a pour over today?
Haeny Yoon:
Yes, I'm very good at it. I feel like I've got perfected it. I've scoured the internet for the timings.
Nathan Holbert:
Does it bloom? Isn't that a thing? I feel like I've read-
Haeny Yoon:
Yeah, of course.
Nathan Holbert:
You got to let it bloom.
Haeny Yoon:
You got to bloom for 45 seconds.
Nathan Holbert:
I think this is a play date we're going to have in the not too distant future is coffee-
Haeny Yoon:
It's going to be a very short episode.
Nathan Holbert:
Exactly 28 seconds.
Haeny Yoon:
Yeah, exactly.
Nathan Holbert:
Well, that was great. So, it's been a fun season. I've actually had a lot of fun playing with our guests and going on adventures with you as well, so thanks for that. Yeah, hopefully our listeners have also enjoyed the play experience.
Haeny Yoon:
Yeah, yeah.
Nathan Holbert:
And we will be back.
Haeny Yoon:
We will be back.
Nathan Holbert:
We will be back. But yeah, we hope you've enjoyed this season, and we look forward to coming back with you again next fall.
Haeny Yoon:
Yeah.
Nathan Holbert:
Great.
Haeny Yoon:
Thanks for joining us.
Nathan Holbert:
Thanks for joining us. Please leave a comment, rate the show, share the episode with friends.
Haeny Yoon:
Yes, that too. Yes.
Nathan Holbert:
Alrighty.
Haeny Yoon:
All right.
Nathan Holbert:
Bye.
Haeny Yoon:
Bye.