Speaker:

Eric Gordon
Emerson College

Title:

Meaningful Inefficiencies: Challenging the Structure of Civic Systems Through Play

Abstract:

Recent years have seen a shift in people’s expectations of public institutions – from city government, to schools, to hospitals. What media critic Jose van Dijck calls “a culture of connectivity,” fueled by ever efficient platforms for interaction, has enhanced expectations of responsiveness in nearly every aspect of social and civic life. When a text is sent, a response is expected within minutes; when a button is clicked, a response is expected instantaneously. So what we expect from institutions is informed by what we expect from each other and all the technologies that mediate our encounters.

In this changing context, there is emerging a culture of engagement - a renewed, sometimes abstract, emphasis on public engagement. This is partly a result of enhanced expectations for immediacy and responsiveness, and partly a clamoring for relevance at a time when trust in institutions is in severe decline. This culture of engagement suggests a shift in institutional thinking whereby institutions are responsible for building and maintaining relationships with individuals and groups through common tools of interaction, from face-to-face conversation to social media exchanges. Government, for example, is no longer given a free pass to be a faceless institution; it is now, along with other institutions such as churches and schools, expected to engage with people in a human readable way. Perhaps ironically, the more communication is mediated by new technologies, the more people demand human-scale relationships with their institutions.

But there are fewer opportunities for human encounter within civic systems as new technologies are pushing public institutions to more and more efficient means of facilitating, monitoring, and promoting interactions. Moments for relation, deliberation, and learning are sidelined for the certainty of big data analytics and proscriptive tools. The culture of engagement is programmed within the neoliberal fantasy space of civic technology. Borrowing from philosopher Bernard Suit’s definition of games as highly inefficient systems, I propose a process of civic intervention called meaningful inefficiencies, wherein encounters within systems are designed as moments of play within rule-bound constraints. A meaningful inefficiency, I argue, is a strategic intervention into institutions where social interactions have become data points to be processed. It inserts the quality of play into technologically efficient systems and challenges the predictability of outputs promised by this new culture of engagement.

In this talk, I explore several case studies of meaningful inefficiencies, where strategically reimagining institutions as games and interactions as play, enable relation, deliberation and learning to emerge.

Bio:
Eric Gordon is an associate professor in the department of Visual and Media Arts at Emerson College where he is the founding director of the Engagement Lab. He is also a faculty associate at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. Eric studies civic media and public engagement within the US and the developing world. He is specifically interested in the application of games and play in these contexts. He has served as an expert advisor for the UN Development Program, the International Red Cross / Red Crescent, the World Bank, as well as municipal governments throughout the United States. In addition to articles and chapters on games, digital media, urbanism and civic engagement, he is the author of two books: Net Locality: Why Location Matters in a Networked World (Blackwell 2011, with Adriana de Souza e Silva) and The Urban Spectator: American Concept Cities From Kodak to Google (Dartmouth 2010). His edited volume (with Paul Mihailidis) entitled Civic Media: Technology, Design, Practice will be published by MIT Press in 2016. He received his Ph.D. in 2003 from the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California.