Everything Bad Is Good for You (27 page)

When I think back to my ten-year-old self, sprawled on my bedroom floor, consulting my dice-baseball charts as though they were some kind of statistical scripture, I can see all the defining characteristics of the Sleeper Curve lurking there, in embryo. I was amusing myself, no doubt, but the amusement came from the challenge of probing a virtual world, learning and inventing its rules along the way. Each game that arrived in the mail, each game that I designed myself, offered an intoxicating new universe to explore. Eventually, I found that I liked the process of picking up a new game more than I liked actually playing them. There were no interesting narratives that emerged out of my dice-baseball obsessions, and no moral instruction. I suspect my people skills suffered somewhat for all those hours locked alone in my room. But I am convinced that during this phase of my life, no other activity—in the classroom or anywhere else—engaged my mind with as much focus and conceptual rigor. I was learning how to
think
there on the floor with my twenty-sided dice and my situation charts. It might not have looked like much—but then again, neither does sitting around with your nose in a book.

Those years I passed with my baseball simulations are now a routine rite of passage for most kids today, whether they're probing the worlds of
Zelda,
or learning new communication protocols, or tracking the multiple threads of
Finding Nemo.
Believing in the Sleeper Curve does not mean that teachers or parents or role models have become obsolete. It does not mean that we should give up on reading and let our kids spend all their free time tethered to the Xbox. But it does mean that we should discard, once and for all, a number of easy assumptions we like to make about the state of modern society. The cultural race to the bottom is a myth; we do not live in a fallen state of cheap pleasures that pale beside the intellectual riches of yesterday. And we are not innate slackers, drawn inexorably to the least offensive and least complicated entertainment available. All around us the world of mass entertainment grows more demanding and sophisticated, and our brains happily gravitate to that newfound complexity. And by gravitating, they make the effect more pronounced. Dumbing down is not the natural state of popular culture over time—quite the opposite. The great unsung story of our culture today is how many welcome trends are going up.

I
WROTE
Everything Bad Is Good for You
to start a conversation, but for the first month or two after the book's release, I seriously worried that the conversation would never stop. Even before the book hit the shelves in the U.S., the
Sunday Times
in London was reporting on the counterintuitive new book in America that was stirring up controversy. After the book's official release, I averaged about ten interviews a day for at least a month. The blogosphere buzzed with discussion of the Sleeper Curve theory. Stories about the book appeared in newspapers in a dozen different countries, even though it had not yet been translated anywhere. A reader in Sweden sent me a photograph of a tabloid newspaper headline that announced:
CRITIC SAYS REALITY TV MAKES YOU SMARTER!

One of the most memorable face-to-face conversations about the book came during the promotional tour for the UK edition, which came out a few weeks after the American version. Selling the British on the Sleeper Curve theory was a task I faced with some trepidation. I knew the argument for the complexity of games and the Internet would apply just as readily to a British audience, but I worried about the television story. It was easy enough to convince Americans of the sorry state of late-seventies programs, but wouldn't the august tradition of the BBC make the Brits less sympathetic to the case?

My concern grew when I learned that my UK publisher had booked me to appear on a prestigious BBC Radio 3 cultural program shortly after my arrival. The format, as it was explained to me, sounded like a recipe for public humiliation: a moderator would first ask me to present my argument, and then a “responder”—a respected British cultural critic, I was told—would offer his perspective on my theory. I arrived at the studio at the very last minute, and thus was only able to exchange the briefest of hellos with the responder, whom I assumed to be a
Crossfire
-style opponent who would soon be scornfully dismissing my American junk culture apologia. Within a few seconds, it seemed, the program had begun, and I was trotting out my—slightly jet-lagged—rendition of the book's argument. After ten minutes or so, the moderator turned to the responder, and said: “What do you make of this? Does Mr. Johnson's argument seem convincing to you?”

The responder paused for a second, and then uttered what was probably the least likely sequence of words I could have imagined. “Well, I have to say I was
shocked
that he managed to write an entire book about the intelligence of popular culture without once mentioning
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
.” He then went on to deliver a thoroughly convincing discourse on the structural and philosophical complexity of
Buffy
that could indeed have been a long-lost chapter from
Everything Bad
.

I probably should have seen the
Buffy
response coming. For every critic of
Everything Bad
who found something unconvincing in my argument, there was another reader whose primary objection involved some pop culture classic that I had left out. A number of people rightly complained that I had ignored HBO's brilliant crime drama
The Wire
; sci-fi fans invariably pointed to the lack of
Firefly
and
Babylon Five
references; reality show denizens griped that I had ignored
The Amazing Race
. The wonderful pop culture critic Henry Jenkins even suggested during a public discussion of the book at MIT that the Sleeper Curve theory would apply equally well to the last thirty years of comic books and professional wrestling.

Perhaps the most glaring omissions simply arrived too late to be included in the book: the international megahit
Lost
, whose layered, intertwined story of two dozen plane crash survivors embodied all the Sleeper Curve principles that I described—including the extraordinary fan sites devoted to the show's labyrinthine mysteries.
Lost
took the “most repeatable programming” argument to a new level economically: not only could complex programming make a profit, it could almost single-handedly transform the fortunes of an entire network. Meanwhile, in the games sector, the most popular PC game in the U.S. during the fall of 2005 was the staggeringly complex simulation Civilization IV, which allowed gamers to re-create the entire course of human techno-economic history.

But not everyone thought the sins of
Everything Bad
were purely ones of omission. There were more than a few skeptics, though perhaps fewer than I had anticipated. Interestingly, such criticism tended to come more from the left than from the right. (The moral values coalition seemed to ignore the book altogether.) Some criticisms seemed to willfully ignore sections of the argument, and for those I'll let the original text speak for itself. But more than a few raised valid objections that are worth responding to in some detail.

First, the politics of
Everything Bad
. A number of readers took the book as one long apologia for unfettered, high-tech capitalism. One otherwise positive review in the
Chicago Tribune
decried the book's “pro-capitalist argument” that would “make even Adam Smith blush.”

I do not, in fact, believe that unfettered capitalism leads inevitably to smarter culture (this is presumably what would make Adam Smith blush.) I think capitalism has in general had a spotty record when it comes to sharpening the minds of the people living within it: most of the success stories have involved significant, if not indispensable, contributions from the public sector. What I am generally optimistic about is 1) the power of truly interactive technologies to sharpen minds, and 2) the innate drives in the human brain to seek out mental challenge when given the opportunity.

As my first two books made clear, I am much more of a technological determinist than an economic determinist. So the question for me isn't: What is capitalism doing to our minds? Rather, the question is: What is the reigning technological paradigm—combined with both market and public-sector forces—doing to our minds? The book makes it pretty clear that I think the combination of free market capitalism and the mass media communication technologies of the midto late-twentieth century led to simpler, less demanding popular culture. The same could certainly be said of industrial technologies and nineteenth-century capitalism: factory labor was no doubt a mind-deadening experience. But I do think we are living through a period when the combination of digital-age network technologies, public sector investment (the creation of the Internet itself), and market-driven incentives (the “most repeatable programming” notion) have come together to create an upward trend in the complexity of the culture. But that's not simply cheerleading for free markets, even if it is a kind of cheerleading.

It's also worth pointing out that one of the most significant challenges in recent memory to the capitalist model of private property has emerged precisely out of the gaming/geek community: open source software, Wikipedia, peer-to-peer file sharing, the alternative economies being developed in online worlds, and so on. If you're looking for evidence of people using their minds to imagine alternatives to the dominant economic structures of their time, you'll find far more experiments coming out of today's pop culture than you would have in the pop culture of the late seventies or eighties. Thanks to their immersion in this networked culture, the “kids today” are much more likely to embrace collective projects that operate outside the traditional channels of commercial ownership. They're also much more likely to think of themselves as producers of media, sharing things for the love of it, than the passive TV generation that Neil Postman chronicled. There's still plenty of mindless materialism out there, of course, but I think the trend is a positive one.

Most readers and critics seemed to embrace the structural story of the Sleeper Curve: the idea that the pop cultural forms have been steadily getting more complex and mentally challenging over the past thirty years. (The commercial success of
Lost
and Civilization IV in the months following the book's release didn't hurt, of course.) The problems arose in the second half of the book's argument, where I argued that the trend toward increased complexity was having positive effects on our minds. Most of these objections revolved, in one way or another, around my invocation of the Flynn Effect and rising IQ scores.

Some readers rightly pointed out that IQ—and even
g
—are relatively narrow definitions of intelligence. Thus it's not right to claim that “pop culture is making us smarter” if you're using a narrow definition of what it means to be smart. To those critics I say: I focused on IQ because it was the one area where there was actually some good data, in the sense that we definitely know that IQ scores are rising. But I am not particularly wedded to IQ as a metric, and I suspect that there are many other—potentially more important—ways in which we're getting smarter as well, most of which we don't test for. Probably the most important is what we sometimes call system thinking: analyzing a complex system with multiple interacting variables changing over time. IQ scores don't track this skill at all, but it's precisely the sort of thing you get extremely good at if you play a lot of Sim-City-like games. It is not a trivial form of intelligence at all—it's precisely the “lack” of system thinking skills that makes it hard for people to intuitively understand things like ecosystems or complex social problems.

One of the reasons I wrote the book was to encourage the academic community to do research into the potential for positive impact, instead of endlessly rehashing the does-media-violence-beget-real-world-violence question. The good news is that these studies are finally starting to appear, and a number of them have confirmed my more anecdotal observations in
Everything Bad
. As I write, a new study has just been released that shows that video game play sharpens the brain's ability to shift from an “idle” state of inactivity to a focused, task-driven state, and to separate out signal from noise in a complex situation. These are crucial mental skills—particularly in an oversaturated environment with many potential distractions—and they're ones that tend to atrophy in middle age. The researchers actually recommend playing video games for elderly people trying to keep their minds sharp.

But these studies are still rarities, which means the strong argument of the Sleeper Curve is still conjecture. For some critics, that lack of definitive proof was a deal breaker. And yet, when one looks at comparable books in the past that have made equivalent—though diametrically opposed—statements about the culture and its impact on our intelligence, one finds that
Everything Bad
is much more concerned with empirical evidence than its predecessors. In a way, you can think of the book as a mirror-image version of books like
The Closing of the American Mind
and
Amusing Ourselves to Death
—both of which made bold claims about the impact of culture on the American mind in their titles. If you go back and look at those books, they offer no evidence whatsoever that people are literally being dumbed-down; they simply offer an anecdotal survey of the culture at large, compare it to past cultural moments, and conclude that the trend is a negative one, and thus likely to have negative effects on our minds.

Now, I happen to think this is a perfectly valid way to write—cultural critics have a role to play, and it's not the exact same role that a social scientist should be expected to play. And I certainly could have taken that approach in
Everything Bad Is Good for You
: simply analyzing the cultural forms on their own terms, and making conclusions based on those observations. There would have been no science, no evidence, no proof—just observation and analysis.

But I didn't want the book to exist solely on the cultural level. So I went out of my way to include other evidence and explanatory models to back up my thesis. I explained how the popular forms appear to be sharpening precisely the kinds of skills that are measured by IQ tests, and then showed that IQ scores are rising. I looked at the Harvard study of gamers in the business population to demonstrate that those skills have real-world applicability, and pointed to the Rochester visual study to show that even very tight-focus studies show clear transfer of skills from gameplay to real-world application. In the notes, I deconstruct the numbers behind the illusion of declining SAT scores, and explain why test scores have been actually rising since the nadir of seventies television. And I brought in evidence from the brain sciences to explain why this kind of learning should be happening in the first place.

Is the argument incontrovertible, based purely on the lab evidence? Of course not. It's an opening volley, an invitation for further research. But I worked to make it much more rigorous—at least where hard evidence is concerned—than most of the sweeping declarations about the popular mind than we've debated in the past.

But however bullish I am about the state of pop culture, this book should not be mistaken for an extended justification for sitting around glued to the Xbox 360 all day. During the promotional tour for the book, and in talks that I've given since, I often found myself telling the story of why my wife and I moved to our neighborhood in Brooklyn after our second boy was born: We wanted our kids to have the diverse stimulations of urban life
and
the connection to nature that Prospect Park gives them. We didn't want them to grow up exclusively in suburban rec rooms staring at screens all weekend long. We wanted them to have a balanced diet of life experiences: building forts in the woods, creating worlds on the computer screen, watching
Finding Nemo
, making friends on the playground, reading books, sending email, surfing the web, playing baseball.