Author: David Bennahum
Publisher: Basic Books
Place: New York
Date: 1998
Pages: 238p
Extra Life is a fascinating and intimately personal autobiographical account of a young man whose difficult childhood and adolescent years coincided with the emergence of computing technologies on a commercial scale. Bennahum's early childhood was marked by intense experiences and feelings of displacement and difference when his family moved to Paris in 1972. Shortly after moving the family back to New York in 1977 (when he was 9), his parents separated. Against this background, described in poignant yet sympathetic terms, Bennahum relives the birth of Space Invaders, the Atari 800, BASIC and DOS during his pre-teenage years. The book's title derives from the extra lives skilled players could get in games like Space Invaders by scoring high. The concept of "extra life" takes on a larger and much richer metaphorical significance, however, as Bennahum opens his life to us.
In delightfully engaging prose, Bennahum captures the lived meaning of these new technologies in his own life and in the lives of close friends. The Atari arrived in time for Bennahum to withdraw from a freewheeling early adolescence of teenage kicks before he had even reached his teens, and before he seriously risked going the way of some of his mates into criminal delinquency and incarceration. We are treated to close, rich, and graphic recollections of the delights Bennahum experienced via programming and gaming at a time when the 'insides' of computers were still accessible to ordinary folk who took the time to explore them.
Douglas Rushkoff describes the book as "a Catcher in the Rye for the Atari generation". It is certainly that. It is a splendid read.
While most of the book deals with his pre adolescent and adolescent years, Bennahum also takes us briefly through the arrival of the Apple Mac - and his own hacker-angst response: "Where's the operating system? was the first thing I thought as I stared at the Macintosh's screen. Where is the system?" (p. 210) - to postgraduate life after Harvard and a job interview for Microsoft. Although one senses there is probably a second book to be written about these later years, it is clear that Bennahum's heart and mind are with the pioneering period, before mass consumption personal computers got "black-boxed".
The middle chapters in the book - its heart - take us deep into the culture of pre-black box, teenage (male) hacker-geek computing. These chapters are set in the context of Bennahum's high school years at Horace Mann: in particular, in the computer room and the stunning pedagogical and cultural milieu created and caringly overseen by Mr Moran - the kind of teacher who makes education possible, even in a school. If the book is a "Catcher in the Rye for the Atari generation", it is also a skilfully presented and well grounded philosophy of education. Bennahum's account of the adolescent boys' cultural space of programming, gaming and hacking is at the same time an exemplary account of learning. In these chapters a full on enthusiasm for engagement with human tools becomes one with a full on love of learning. Theory and practice, concepts and action, ideas and experimentation, logic and application, values and principles, cognitive and moral dissonance and their resolution, collaboration and collegiality and, above all, what Paulo Freire calls "epistemological curiosity"; all these things that are the stuff of educative learning; come together in a powerful account of what education can be.
Extra Life is a "must read" book for educators. It gives us important insights into the cultural gulf between mindsets, experiences, and worldviews at work in so many contemporary classrooms - including the marked differences between education policymakers, reformers and teachers whom John Perry Barlow might call "immigrants" to the world of cyberspace, and those student "natives" who have been born right into it. The book takes us so deeply and informatively into the cultural world inhabited by Bennahum during his school years, and his consciousness of that world, that we are simply denied space for indulging all-too-easy denigrations of popular culture and what it isn't so far as crtitcally aware intellectual, social and political engagement are concerned.
At the same time, it denies us recourse to naïve and romantic celebrations of digital culture and its potential to redeem education. Instead, educators who read this book with open minds and a will to learn from it will find themselves facing an important educational challenge: how do we construct and negotiate effective pedagogy across and between what are often quantumly different mindsets, values systems, experiences and identities at large in the classroom? Extra Life does more than simply invite us to look this challenge in the eye. It also provides us with wonderful material from the lives of some not so untypical young people that will better prepare us for meeting it.
Any educator - be they parent, teacher, researcher, policymaker or administrator - who seriously wants to grow with their vocation, and to grow in learning with those dialectical "Others" known as students, will find many rich rewards in this book - as will the Atari generation for whom it was mainly written. The open handed generosity Bennahum displays throughout the book inspires confidence that he will not begrudge this somewhat instrumental educational reading of his book. While the book might justly be claimed by the Atari Generation, it would be a pity indeed if educators of any generation passed by such a grand opportunity for extra life.
Although I loved books, escape through electronic games differed from escape through reading. Both created environments that required an active imagination. For the literate, words on a page formed an illusion. To the uninitiated, pixels or diodes on a screen were as abstract as letters are to the illiterate; however, they too served as the foundations of immersive environments. For the multiliterate able to read and dexterous at video games, the difference between the worlds of books and games was substantial. (p. 25)
Learning the games became part of socializing. You didn't merely stay at home, shut in and gaming all the time - you boasted about your score, showed off your tricks, and learned from others who knew more. While the immediate interaction between player and game was solitary, the greater interacion was communal. (p. 26)
I decided the best thing to do was find an adult to purchase condoms for me. The best person to do that was my dope dealer. Since twelve year olds couldn't buy dirty magazines, I was convinced that I couldn't buy condoms either. My dealer didn't dissuade me from this assumption � He agreed to buy me a box of Trojans after I gave him $10 and told him to keep the change. (p. 49)
"Type RUN," I told my dad. He leaned over my desk with his face close to the keyboard and typed. My computer [a brand new present from his father] reponded.
HELLO THERE. WHAT IS YOUR NAME?
"Type your name," I said. My dad grinned.
NICE TO MEET YOU MICHAEL
NICE TO MEET YOU MICHAEL
NICE TO MEET YOU MICHAEL
It went on and on.
"You did this?"
I nodded. "Yeah. I read the book," I said, pointing to the manual. (p. 74)
In this new environment [the computer room at Horace Mann] I took the first steps out of our vernacular, where programming tricks were passed as love from kid to kid, into the formal realm of programming theory. Here philosophy came alive in the form of our games, our programs, the operating system, and computer languages housed on the PDP's metallic disk drives. (p. 99)
In our liberal arts classes we were given tools to interpret texts, then were expected to formulate coherent arguments of our own � What we had in the computer room was the extension of this literacy to the digital frontier. We were given tools to analyze and deconstruct computer programs and thus acquired the ability to understand computer-mediated systems � We were being prepared for adulthood in a new world where information � went from scarce to abundant. Without preparation such plenitude could become a curse, experienced as information overload. (pp. 99-100)
In the computer room all of us - Boz, Haahr, Hilal, and even Mr Moran - would have raging arguments about politics, but rarely from dogmatic positions. None of us identified with Democrats or Republicans. Some teachers mistook this for apathy. We did care about solutions to problems in our society, but our approach was different. I imagined that at some future point we would settle unresolved societal issues by modelling problems and looking for different outcomes. (p. 141)
Where at thirteen I'd veered away from one path with Eric and Tim, my sister, now at that age and in eighth grade, hurtled forward, seemingly unstoppable. I'd found a compelling alterative in the gift of a computer; what might the equivalent muse be for Samantha? � I was the only kid in my grade who had a semi-runaway sister, a thirteen year old who did not always come home to sleep, a girl who spent her nighttime in houses and apartments in places I didn't know. Little sisters aren't supposed to do that. And big brothers are supposed to protect them. (pp 180-181)
The very quality that made the Internet alluring - its ability to connect myriad computer systems, low cost, and barrier-free structure - is at stake. Why should things be open or clear since private ownership, a killer-application of one's own, is the apotheosis of our age? The Net, with its brief, brilliant promise of a new media freed from artificial monopolies - a place where constraint and scarcity is replaced by abundance and liberty - faces the prospect of mutating into just another form of television, where ideas, distribution, and manufacture are all owned, trademarked, patented, and squeezed into neat corrals of property, all the better to derive a fortune. (p. 233)