The ominant feature of modern technology is not how productive it makes us, or how it has revolutionized the workplace, but how enjoyable it is. We take pleasure in our devices, from smartphones to personal computers to televisions. Whole classes of leisure activities rely on technology. How has technology become such an integral part of enjoyment? In this book, Barry Brown and Oskar Juhlin examine the relationship between pleasure and technology, investigating what pleasure and leisure are, how they have come to depend on the many forms of technology, and how we might design technology to support enjoyment. They do this by studying the experience of enjoyment, documenting such activities as computer gameplay, deer hunting, tourism, and television watching. They describe technologies that support these activities, including prototype systems that they themselves developed.
Brown and Juhlin argue that pleasure is fundamentally social in nature. We learn how to enjoy ourselves from others, mastering it as a set of skills. Drawing on their own ethnographic studies and on research from economics, psychology, and philosophy, Brown and Juhlin argue that enjoyment is a key concept in understanding the social world. They propose a framework for the study of enjoyment: the empirical program of enjoyment.
Barry Brown and Oskar Juhlin
ENJ
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MACHINES
Enjoying Machines
Enjoying Machines
Barry Brown and Oskar Juhlin
The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England
© 2015 Massachusetts institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. MlT Press books may be purchased at special quantity discounts for business or sales promotional use. For information, please email
[email protected] Set in Stone by the MlT Press. Printed and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Brown, Barry, 1972Enjoying machines I Barry Brown and Oskar Juhlin. pages em includes bibliographical references and index. lSBN 978-0-262-02878-3 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Technology-Psychological aspects. 3. Pleasure. T14.5.B77
4. Amusements. 2015
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2. Technology-Social aspects.
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As life continues, the society of the future will develop an experience that will be the outcome of a profound analysis, the possibilities of which are already being revealed before our eyes. And it is by means of gorgeous preliminary analysis that the picto rial experience ... can establish its foundations here and now. This pictorial experi ence confirms my faith in the unknown possibilities of life. All the unknown things that are coming to light convince me that our happiness too depends on an enigma inseparable from men and that our only duty is to try to grasp this enigma. Rene Magritte, "La Ligne de vie" ["Lifeline"], lecture at Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp, November 20, 1938
Contents
Acknowledgments ix 1
Why is pleasure important?
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Why do we need to look at pleasure? 5 A program 9 A preview of the chapters 11 2
What is enjoyment?
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Pleasure is worldly 16 Pleasure is a skill 20 Pleasure is ordinary 26 Pleasure is felt 31 The empirical program of enjoyment 36
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Play, games, and enjoyment 3