The Fun Theory

*Our conversation in class today is a reflection of this post, which just so happens to also be about repetition*

After reading Jonah’s blog post, “The Shared Experience of Absurdity” I could not help but think about the repetitive nature of our lives. At least in college, we wake up, eat, go to class, maybe sleep a little more, eat again, then fall asleep and do it all over again the next day. We have been practicing this same routine for so long that it almost feels like we are cheating ourselves when we do something out of the ordinary. Maybe our monotonous tendencies stem from this structuralist perspective on intertextuality, which is introduced by Joe Moran within the book, Interdiscipinarity. With the concept of intertextuality in mind, “texts are formulated not through acts of originality by individual authors but through interaction and dialogue with other texts,” (76). The concepts and ideas that comprise our world are but recycled versions of other ideas that were thought of long ago. Everything that we say, do or even own was once just an idea that someone had, which was then used as the platform for another idea. It is not our fault that we can get stuck in these cyclic and sometimes even stale habits, for we are only mirroring a practice that has been done since the beginning of time.

Jonah’s post, as well as the routinely nature of our lives then reminded me of this theory that I had read about many years ago. Volkswagen created this theory, dubbed the “fun theory,” in 2009, in an attempt to prove that, “something as simple as fun is the easiest way to change people’s behavior for the better.” The purpose of this “fun theory” movement is to essentially get people to participate in everyday activities that they should already be participating in. The people at Volkswagen believe that if we were to make things like, recycling or doing something as simple as taking the stairs more fun, more people would actually do it. In the video, they test out this “fun theory” by turning an ordinary bottle bank into an arcade game. In the course of one evening, the “fun” bottle bank arcade was used by almost one hundred people. In the same evening, the “conventional” bottle bank was only used twice. What does this say about our society? Has our life become so mundane that we need things to be ”fun” in order to do the right thing? Has the basic act of recycling, or taking the stairs become so tedious or repetitive to the extent that it is almost a burden? Are we just going through the motions rather than experiencing life? I may be reading far too much into this theory that is only meant to be playful in nature, however I cannot help but question its implications as well as its relation to the lack of variety in our daily routine.

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