Imagination and Play in the Electronic Age

Television, video games, and computers are easily accessible to twenty-first-century children, but what impact do they have on creativity and imagination? In this book, two wise and long-admired observers of children's make-believe look at the cognitive and moral potential--and concern--created by electronic media.

Table of Contents:
Contents Prologue 1 Our Conscious Imagination 2 Play: Its Beginnings and Stages 3 Television and Imagination 4 Violent Themes in Play, TV Content, and Video Games 5 Adrift in Cyberspace: Children and Computer Play 6 A Role for Play in Early Learning Epilogue References Index

About the Author :
Dorothy G. Singer is Senior Research Scientist in the Psychology Department at Yale University, where she co-directs the Yale Family Television Research and Consultation Center. Jerome L. Singer is Professor Emeritus in the Psychology Department at Yale University, where he co-directs the Yale Family Television Research and Consultation Center.

Review :
Brings to light some potentially important issues for how various forms of media may facilitate or hinder the likelihood of young children engaging in symbolic and imaginative play...The book should be required reading for persons with an interest in the question of how the shifts in childhood leisure time activities may be affecting culture as a whole. -- Robert T. Hitlan and M. Catherine DeSoto PsycCritiques 20060308 Concise and readable, this book offers a compelling examination of the ways in which video games, television, and the Internet (both e-mail and the Web) help to shape the lives of contemporary children, adolescents, and adults. Singer and Singer focus on the younger set, and they begin with a discussion of the mind's capacity for growth and self-knowledge. They move through an authoritative discussion of the impact of television on individual consciousness to arrive at a reasoned but impassioned indictment (no other word seems possible) of violent "point and kill" video games, which reduce all social transactions to the level of primal violence. In the chapter titled 'Adrift in Cyberspace,' the authors discuss the implications of children set free in that vast territory. The volume concludes with an argument for the "role of play in early learning," in which corporate sponsors do not commodify children's imaginations. Lucid, reasoned, elegantly written, and meticulously documented, this is a volume of considerable importance and value. -- W. W. Dixon Choice 20050701 Senior Research Scientist Dorothy G. Singer and Professor Emeritus Jerome L. Singer provide the reader with a compelling examination of how television and video games both foster and impede a child's imagination and creativity...As electronic media becomes more prevalent in the lives of children, Imagination and Play in the Electronic Age is essential reading for all concerned educators and parents. -- Javier Gonzalez Childhood Education In the prevailing climate of judicial criticism of the growing medication of children for Attention Deficit Disorder, a book about the effect of the ever-increasing electronic bombardment of today's youth is timely...The studies presented in this book are likely to be of interest to family lawyers dealing with parenting cases involving heavy usage of electronic babysitting and criminal lawyers interested in probing the causation of mitigating psychological disorders. If the electronic screen is the square, here is the argument that we should all think outside it. -- Yasmine Swifte Law Society Journal 20070701