"Imagine a version of Brave New World where soma and the feelies make you smarter"

In Part 2 of Everything Bad Is Good For You, Johnson sets out to show the proof in his argument that the added complexity of pop culture is actually improving the general population's mind.  He begins by looking at IQ tests over multiple generations and notes that average IQ scores have gone up, especially in "problem-solving and pattern-recognition skills" measured by the Raven Progress Matrices test (148-149).  Johnson does not give evidence that this increase in IQ scores is definitely created by the change in pop culture, but does point out that the increase is measurable across culture and environment.  There is a bit of a leap of faith to believe that there is no other cause that could have created this score increase or that pop culture in conjunction with some other factor caused the score.

Johnson touches on the profit in making TV shows and movies more complicated, citing increased DVD sales which reward repeated viewings.  He argues that before VCR, DVD, DVR and a host of other acronyms you pretty much got one shot at seeing a TV show, so if the show was too complicated and it was easy to miss small details you would lose your audience, which means a loss of profits.  Now that you can watch and rewatch shows and movies there is profitable motivation to make these layered and complex enough to warren multiple viewings.  If the show is too simple, there's no reason to see it multiple times which means there is no reason to buy it on DVD.

Johnson mentions that neuroscience shows "that the brain has dedicated systems that respond to -- and seek out --new challenges and experiences" (181) and says this is why people seek out more complex forms of entertainment.  And while it is true that the amount of reading people do is on the decline, so are all forms of entertainment because there are so many different things for the average person to do now and there are still the same number of hours in a day.

Can you think of any anecdotal evidence of pop culture improving the mind?  Or do you think pop culture is catering to the lowest common denominator? 

Title quote from page 179

Johnson, Steven.  Everything Bad Is Good For You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter.  Riverhead Books, New York.  2006.

"The Sleeper Curve does not mean Survivor will someday be viewed as our Heart of Darkness"

Johnson continues his argument that pop culture is becoming on average more complex instead of the perceived race to the bottom.  The rest of part 1 of the book focuses on pop culture in the forms of movies, the internet and TV.  He makes compelling arguments in all three cases but I liked his TV section the best and since this is my blog I'm going to discuss that section.

He splits the TV argument into 2 sections: traditional narrative TV shows with actors and a script and reality TV shows.  It's easier to make the argument that traditional narrative TV shows are becoming more complex.  He looks at theme of "multithreaded" stories, stories that follow multiple storylines and have multiple important characters such as The Sopranos, Lost, ER, and The West Wing.  It's not only the amount of threads a person has to keep straight while watching, the shows now lack the "narrative handholding" (74) shows used to feature.  TV shows force you to fill in the blanks and probe the show to understand the narrative, just as the video games force you to probe the worlds.  It takes more mental exercise to follow these complex stories than it does to follow a simpler show, such as Dragnet.

It doesn't take too much to go along with Johnson in his argument that dramas such as these are becoming more complex but it's his argument that reality TV is also more complex than TV shows of previous generations.  It's hard to really imagine a way that reality TV can be cognitively good for anyone.  When people think of pandering to the lowest common denominator reality TV is at the forefront of that argument.  But Johnson manages to make a convincing argument that even TV shows like Joe Millionaire have a cognitive benefit that other game shows lack.  I don't want this entry to be me just rehashing the arguments he makes in the book, but the argument I found most compelling is the idea that reality TV shows focus the audience to analyze people on these TV shows: why do they make the alliances they do, what did that look mean, etc.  Reality TV shows exercise the audiences autism quotient, or the ability to "read emotional cues, anticipating the inner thoughts and feelings of other people" (98).  One of the most interesting arguments Johnson makes centers around the Nixon-Kennedy debates, "where the guy with the best makeup always wins" (100).  Much is made about this debate and the dumbing down of the nation, where appearance is more important that the substance of what people say, but Johnson argues that those watching the debate on TV had access to extra emotional information that wasn't available to those who were simply listening.

"TV viewers...thought Nixon's sweating and five-o'clock shadow made him look shifty and untrustworthy...What if it wasn't Nixon's lack of makeup that troubled the TV watchers?  After all, Nixon did turn out to be shifty and untrustworthy in the end." (103)

So what do you think?  Is there some benefit to reality TV?  Are narrative TV shows getting more complex and engaging the audience more?

Title quote from page 132

Johnson, Steven.  Everything Bad Is Good For You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter.  Riverhead Books, New York.  2006.

"The sky is not falling. In many ways, the weather has never been better. It just takes a new kind of barometer to tell the difference"

I've started re-reading my next book Everything Bad Is Good For You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter by Steven Johnson.  I picked this as my next book because I figured I've read a couple fiction books and I should mix it up with a non-fiction one.  Originally I was going to re-read Kitchen Confidential but I've read that one a number of times and I've only read this one once before.  Don't worry, my next book will be completely new to me.  By the way, the title quote is from the intro, page xvi.

 

Steven describes the book as "an old-fashioned work of persuasion" (xv) to prove that today's pop culture is not a brain drain on the culture that every op-ed piece seems to suggest, but rather that there are actual cognitive benefits to TV and video games. 

His first section, and the section I've just finished reading, concerns video games, which is probably one of the most demonized forms of pop culture.  I will start this by saying I am not a gamer by any stretch of the imagination, though I did grow up with one in the form of my brother and thus have seen them in their natural habitat.  I can also say that my Brother the Gamer is far smarter than I am, so anecdotally I can see the brain drain is not affecting him.  I suppose this means I don't need to be persuaded but nonetheless, Johnson makes a compelling argument that video games have evolved from the days of Pong and PacMan to a system of complex tasks, learning through action or "probing" and delayed rewards.  He describes the "mental labor" it takes to complete the tasks "telescoping because of the way the objectives next inside one another like a collapsed telescope" and "part of this skill lies in focusing on immediate problems while still maintaining a long-distance view" (54) which Johnson argues is an important skill exercised by video games that is used in other aspects of life.  It's easy to judge video games by the same criteria books are judged by, but that misses the benefits video games do provide.  Video games won't replace Shakespeare, but then again neither will physics.

What are your general thoughts?  Are the majority of video games mindless wastes of time?  Or is there something more to them?

Johnson, Steven.  Everything Bad Is Good For You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter.  Riverhead Books, New York.  2006.