Playing the Future: How Children's Culture Can Teach Us to Thrive in an Age of Chaos

A cyberculture cicerone, Rushkoff (Media Virus) leads the reader through heady glimpses of the millennium-the 21st century where ""We are all immigrants to a new territory."" And on whom do immigrants usually rely for adjustment and acculturation? Their children, of course. Rushkoff describes today's ""screenager""-the child of the computer/electronic age-as the shaper of a new, evolutionary milieu where change is a constant and chaos can be a good thing. Simplistically, Rushkoff advises parents and educators to relax and appreciate the adaptive skills of their children, and to look to them ""for answers to some of our own problems adapting to postmodernity."" This post-McLuhan view of a world where Barney and mob behavior can be connected is, in its untrammeled enthusiasm for media, demanding, often bewildering reading for anyone not tuned in to Power Rangers or Pulp Fiction. $50,000 ad/promo; foreign rights: David Vigliano. (June)