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| Do you know this great man? Do you know what he said . . . and did? |
We’re always elated to see visitors
in the Mennonite Heritage Museum. Especially those that ask
questions, ponder the meaning of exhibits and chat among themselves
and with us about the subjects we present.
So when I went to open the museum
yesterday, I was excited to see four people already on the steps.
Waiting for the place to open . . . I assumed. Silly, Luddite,
ever-hopeful me. They were in fact four teens with cell phones
gathered in by the “Mennonite Heritage Museum” sign where a
PokeStop has been placed by the virtual-world “Holy Ghost”
that guides the inner workings of Pokemon
Go.
I’ve
heard it touted as a virtual game that gets people out and about:
exercising, breathing fresh air, meeting real people and making new
friends. The dozen or so drawn by the game to our front yard have
been uniformly oblivious to their surroundings and/or have harboured
too little interest in things historical to engage with me or the
museum. (I’m pretty sure I appear historical to
Pokeman Go
enthusiasts!) Those
I’ve seen haven’t been doing any real exercise; they strolled,
and lolled; one lay down on his back and held his cell phone up, arms
extended for about ten minutes. I tried to engage the four yesterday
in a bit of conversation; they weren’t having any of that
nuisance—not with me, not with each other.
So is
this new—and probably short-lived—virtualized version of
geocaching a “step
in the right direction” for kids who are hooked on gaming and
social media? You tell me.
We
see our humble museum as a classroom, a classroom where curious
people can come to learn useful things, like how they and their
friends came to be here, what their ancestors did to make possible
the life they enjoy, what Martin Luther King meant when he said, “We
don’t make history; history makes us,” or words to that effect.
The
good functioning of any democracy—be it a family, a church, a
community or a country—is dependent on its participants being
knowledgeable about the realities of their world. Isaac Asimov has
said, “There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there
has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a
constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural
life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my
ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’”
My
experience with Pokeman Go
is minimal, confined to a few encounters and the reading of the game
rules on Wikipedia. It
doesn’t take a knowledge of logic to realize that the time Pokeman
Go consumes could have been
spent in other ways, like actually exercising, actually meeting and
getting to know people, actually learning about the world, how it
came to be what it is, what it means to wrestle with its future.
Marshall
McLuhan coined the media phrase, “the
medium is
the
message,”
an insight that has supported our suspicions about TV, for instance,
being more than a tool for acquiring information and entertainment;
the TV in every house changed the culture irrespective of what
programming was chosen to be broadcast. The car, the phone, the
computer and the internet have all in their turn reshaped our
culture, our politics, our socialization.
Pokeman
Go
is just another game? I don’t think so. If it were designed to be
educational or even informative, it might well be a medium
whose message
is constructive in our culture, country, communities. But I can’t
see that message there at all. The message, I fear, will again be the
enrichment of a few highly-knowledgeable entrepreneurs through the
further addiction of the not-yet-knowledgeable young masses.
If
it would ignite enthusiasm for museums, galleries, libraries and
actual travel, I would endorse Pokeman
Go. If
it should turn out, after all, to have this effect, I will humbly apologize—and
then eat the Mennonite Heritage Museum, one brick, one exhibit at a
time.
