Science and knowledge in a ludic performance in the spaces of a contemporary city



Abstract

A contemporary consumption society has become the society of fun, which means that fun and entertainment are playing a more and more important role in its culture. A social range and availability of forms of fun broaden. A number of its forms and places of realization grows. Fun is given more and more time, especially in city conglomerations. Among the areas of a socio cultural life one can also find the ones that, as some researchers believe, are strongly placed in the sphere of seriousness. These cover science and knowledge. According to the author, also these spheres of life are not free from the ludic pressure. Innumerable festivals, fairs, science fairs and days, taking place in closed spaces, but also in the open air of a contemporary university city, compete with one another in a ludic presentation of science and knowledge. A symbiosis of fun, science and knowledge seems to be a perfect realization of the idea: to teach entertaining, to entertain teaching. However, it raises certain doubts. The author of the article quotes the warnings, among others, by Neil Postman, who believes that such a light, easy and pleasurable ludic education does not give a reliable and deep knowledge. The education, and knowledge gain should not be an entertainment, but also a hard work. A belief becoming more and more common in the society that everything that is worth familiarising with may or even should take on the form of entertainment, is disastrous and typical of the times when the sphere of seriousness and fun intermingled almost completely.



Published : 2010-02-20


KantorR. (2010). Science and knowledge in a ludic performance in the spaces of a contemporary city. Studia Etnologiczne I Antropologiczne, 10, 191-206. Retrieved from https://journals.us.edu.pl/index.php/SEIA/article/view/9008

Ryszard Kantor 
Uniwersytet Pedagogiczny w Krakowie Instytut Filozofii i Socjologii  Poland



The Copyright Owners of the submitted texts grant the Reader the right to use the pdf documents under the provisions of the Creative Commons 4.0 International License: Attribution-Share-Alike (CC BY SA). The user can copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose.

1. License

The University of Silesia Press provides immediate open access to journal’s content under the Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/). Authors who publish with this journal retain all copyrights and agree to the terms of the above-mentioned CC BY-SA 4.0 license.

2. Author’s Warranties

The author warrants that the article is original, written by stated author/s, has not been published before, contains no unlawful statements, does not infringe the rights of others, is subject to copyright that is vested exclusively in the author and free of any third party rights, and that any necessary written permissions to quote from other sources have been obtained by the author/s.

If the article contains illustrative material (drawings, photos, graphs, maps), the author declares that the said works are of his authorship, they do not infringe the rights of the third party (including personal rights, i.a. the authorization to reproduce physical likeness) and the author holds exclusive proprietary copyrights. The author publishes the above works as part of the article under the licence "Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International".

ATTENTION! When the legal situation of the illustrative material has not been determined and the necessary consent has not been granted by the proprietary copyrights holders, the submitted material will not be accepted for editorial process. At the same time the author takes full responsibility for providing false data (this also regards covering the costs incurred by the University of Silesia Press and financial claims of the third party).

3. User Rights

Under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license, the users are free to share (copy, distribute and transmit the contribution) and adapt (remix, transform, and build upon the material) the article for any purpose, provided they attribute the contribution in the manner specified by the author or licensor.

4. Co-Authorship

If the article was prepared jointly with other authors, the signatory of this form warrants that he/she has been authorized by all co-authors to sign this agreement on their behalf, and agrees to inform his/her co-authors of the terms of this agreement.

I hereby declare that in the event of withdrawal of the text from the publishing process or submitting it to another publisher without agreement from the editorial office, I agree to cover all costs incurred by the University of Silesia in connection with my application.