The Fidget Spinner Is the Perfect Toy for the Trump Presidency - The New Yorker
▻http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-fidget-spinner-is-the-perfect-toy-for-the-trump-presidency
But the current explosion of popularity in fidget toys extends well beyond children with a diagnosis, as those teachers nationwide—nay, internationally—who have been banning them from their classrooms could surely attest; they have become a universally desirable accessory for tween-aged students. They function, in their seductive tactility, like cigarettes for kids who are still young enough to find smoking completely disgusting. The measure of the craze can be taken with a quick scan of Amazon rankings: a recent search revealed that forty-nine of the fifty best-selling toys were either fidget spinners or fidget cubes. (The only non-fidget-based toy in Amazon’s top fifty sellers was an obscene party card game for adults, with the uplifting name Cards Against Humanity.) No longer a fringe occupation, fidgeting is for all, not just for the few.
This marks a significant evolution—or devolution, if you prefer—in the cultural status of fidgeting. Until very recently, fidgeting was invariably an activity with a pejorative connotation. It was something kids were supposed to stop doing.
This reëvaluation of fidgeting certainly legitimizes the surge in popularity of the fidget spinner, but it does not entirely explain it. Why spinning? And why now? The invention of the spinner has been credited to Catherine Hettinger, described by the Guardian as “a Florida-based creator,” who registered a patent for a finger-spinning toy back in 1997 but was unable at the time to interest toy companies in its marketability. Unfortunately for Hettinger, she allowed the patent to lapse and, therefore, is not profiting from the current craze. (In truth, the spinners currently dominating the market—which are shaped like ergonomic ninja stars—bear only a conceptual resemblance to Hettinger’s prototype, which looks as if it might be a contraceptive diaphragm designed for a whale.)
At the time that Hettinger was floating her invention, a very different craze was making its first inroads into the handheld-toy marketplace. The Tamagotchi, which was launched first in Japan and then globally, was a so-called digital pet, which required certain attentions from its owner to thrive.
Compared with the fidget spinner, the Tamagotchi is a marvel of complexity, stimulating imagination and engendering empathy. Go back even further, to the nineteen-eighties, and you find the Rubik’s Cube, a toy that offers all the haptic satisfaction offered by a fidget spinner, and also combines it with a brainteaser of such sophistication that many of us are little closer to solving it than we were thirty-five years ago.
More recent fads compare favorably, in the cognitive-demand department, to the fidget spinner, too. The Rainbow Loom required considerable dexterity to produce those little bracelets worn by everyone who was between the ages of six and eleven in 2013.
The fidget spinner, it could be argued, is the perfect toy for the age of Trump. Unlike the Tamagotchi, it does not encourage its owner to take anyone else’s feelings or needs into account. Rather, it enables and even encourages the setting of one’s own interests above everyone else’s. It induces solipsism, selfishness, and outright rudeness. It does not, as the Rubik’s Cube does, reward higher-level intellection. Rather, it encourages the abdication of thought, and promotes a proliferation of mindlessness, and it does so at a historical moment when the President has proved himself to be pathologically prone to distraction and incapable of formulating a coherent idea.
#gadget #pratiques_sociales #adolescents #enfants #métaphore
