Everything Bad Is Good for You (28 page)

So why write a book so exclusively focused on the virtues of popular media? Because the virtues of playing baseball and making friends on the playground and communing with nature are universally agreed on, even if some of us feel the experiences are themselves in decline. But the discussion of the popular media has relentlessly focused on the negatives, which makes it impossible for people to make informed decisions about how much is too much. Yes, popular culture can be addictive and time-consuming; yes, you have to draw the line sometimes. The same is true of social interaction, as any parent of a teenager will tell you. But you can't figure out where to draw the line if you don't have a working theory of the potential benefits. To plan a balanced diet, you need to know something about the nutrients in
all
the food groups, not just the ones that have tradition on their side.
Everything Bad
was my attempt to fill in that gap, based partly on science, partly on close reading, partly on my own experiences as a parent and as a consumer of pop culture. Is it the last word on the topic? I certainly hope not.

Brooklyn
February 2006

Games

I
F YOU DON'T COUNT
the game guides, the body of work assessing video game culture is surprisingly thin, given how massive the gaming industry has become. But a few thoughtful texts exist, starting with J. C. Herz's pioneering
Joystick Nation.
Steven Poole's
Trigger Happy
and sections of Douglas Rushkoff's
Playing the Future
feature insightful analysis of gaming culture. The scholar James Paul Gee has done the most interesting work on the cognitive effects of gameplay—particularly in his book
What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy.
Many fascinating experiments in using games as educational tools have come out of the Education Arcade consortium (educationarcade.org), whose cofounder Henry Jenkins has been the model of the pop culture public intellectual, making a number of crucial defenses of games in the media and in the courtroom. Some of the ideas presented here about the logic of gaming are explored from a game designer's point of view in
Rules of Play,
a textbook coauthored by Eric Zimmerman and Katie Salen. The field of video game theory is sometimes called “ludology”; for further reading about this nascent critical movement, I recommend the Web sites ludology.org and seriousgames.org. Readers interested in the way gaming culture is transforming business will want to check out two relatively new books:
Got Game,
by John Beck and Mitchell Wade, and Pat Kane's delightful manifesto
The Play Ethic.

Culture-as-System

I
N THE INTRODUCTION
, I
explained that my approach in this book would be more systemic than symbolic, analyzing the forces that bring about a certain cultural form, and not decoding its meaning. I do not want to be misinterpreted here: clearly cultural works do have a direct symbolic relationship to their sociohistorical context, and there are situations where explicating those symbolic relationships can be a productive enterprise. A symbolic or representational intepretation lends itself most directly to what we used to call without scare quotes the Great Books, as opposed to middlebrow popular culture. The classics—and the soon-to-be classics—are in their own right descriptions and explanations of the cultural systems that produced them.
Middlemarch
is both a good story
and
an analysis of mid-nineteenth-century British culture. You could write a book—in fact, many have been written—on how
Middlemarch
represents the challenges and complexities of that culture. But in doing so you're creating a work of
appreciation
and not explanation. The question you're asking is: “What is George Eliot trying to say here?” The questions raised in this book, on the other hand, take a different form. The question is not: “What are the creators of
Grand Theft Auto
trying to say?” The question is: “How did
Grand Theft Auto
come to exist in the first place? And what effects does it have on the people who play it?”

And even that formulation is too specific, because it's not
Grand Theft Auto
that we're ultimately interested in explaining; it's the general cultural tendencies of which
Grand Theft Auto
is a representative example. This is a crucial way in which mass culture differs from high art: with mass culture, the individual works are less interesting than the broader trends, and the interesting question to ask of those trends is where they come from, what kind of cultural ecosystem encourages their development. The advantage of this systemic approach is that it gets you out of the “Madonna Scholars” syndrome. The talk-show hosts and conservative commentators love to poke fun at academics studying lowbrow culture, precisely because they assume that these scholars have the audacity to study “Like a Virgin” in the same way that they would dissect
Remembrance of Things Past.
But if you're looking at the work as part of a larger set of cultural trends, and looking at different scales of experience, then the critique doesn't stick, because what you're ultimately interested in is the way culture affects human minds, not the sanctity of the individual work of art. And right now, like it or not, Madonna has more mind-share than Proust does. (Even if she hasn't had a hit album in a few years.)

This systemic approach, while still not exactly mainstream, has grown increasingly common over the past few years, in both academic and popular forms of commentary. The philosophical attack on symbolic criticism begins in many ways with Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's revolutionary treatises
Anti-Oedipus
and
A Thousand Plateaus—
two almost impossibly dense and allusive works that dismantled the then dominant structure of signifier/signified, replacing it with a complex system of multiple interacting flows. Instead of allegorical trees, Deleuze and Guattari proposed a “rhizome” network model that borrowed extensively from the language of complexity theory. The Deleuzian model grew more useful in the hands of the brilliant and eclectic Manuel De Landa, whose writing analyzed the development of medieval towns, the patterns of language evolution, and the history of weapons all through the lens of complex systems theory. (His book
A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History
is a mind-bending read.)

The fashionable notion of “memes”—originally coined by Richard Dawkins almost as an afterthought in his 1976 book
The Selfish Gene—
also takes a systems approach to the history of culture: like genes themselves, successful ideas (or memes) thrive because they're good at reproducing themselves in other minds, and thus spreading through the population. Their symbolic fitness—their ability to represent or describe the world—is only a secondary value; the defining attribute of the meme is not whether or not it's true, but whether it is capable of reproducing itself, and whether it belongs to a wider system of memes (sometimes called a memeplex) that foster its replication. I recommend Susan Blackmore's artful and eloquent
The Meme Machine
as an introduction to the emerging science of memetics. Though he emphasizes the interpersonal connections that direct the flow of ideas, Malcolm Gladwell's best-selling
The Tipping Point
made a comparable argument using the language of epidemics. Some cultural trends happen, Gladwell argued, because of feedback loops that have little to do with the content of the trend itself: a wave of interest in Hush Puppies surges through society not because the fifties iconography of the shoe represents a desire to return to the simpler values of that earlier time, but rather because the complex system of fashion is filled with threshold points where some new trend starts a self-reinforcing cycle that propels it into national popularity. The shoe is no more an allegory than a brutal flu season is. Douglas Rushkoff had used similar contagion metaphors in his 1993 book
Media Virus,
and while his later
Playing the Future
relied on more symbolic and zeitgeist criticism, it remains probably the closest book in spirit to the argument I have laid out here.

Consilience

A
PPROACHING POPULAR CULTURE
as a complex system of interacting forces necessitates traversing different scales of experience in your analysis. This level-jumping should be familiar from the preceding pages: we looked at the evolution of the storytelling engines of TV dramas as though we were narratologists; the discussion of the rise of meta-commentary might have belonged to a McLuhan-style analysis of new media; the exploration of the brain's reward architecture drew heavily from the latest in neuroscience. The movement from discipline to discipline can't be a simple case of intellectual tourism; the different scales must
connect
to each other, in a kind of consilient chain. The narratological approach explains what's new in the formal structure of a television series or video game; the economic and technological analysis explains the conditions that made that structure possible; and the neuroscience explains why people find the structure appealing in the first place. Each level produces information that is in turn passed down to the next level for analysis.

A map of that chain would look something like this:

Each level produces a series of questions that can only be answered by a level further down the chain. Leave one of those levels out, and the overall picture suffers; blind spots appear in the argument. Focus exclusively on one level and ignore all the others, and the whole interpretative act shifts from explanation to description. You have to climb the entire ladder to get the story right.

One rung on that ladder stands out: the neuroscience. Cultural criticism has a long history of ignoring the sciences (hard and soft), and a recent history of outright hostility in the many attempts to deconstruct or relativize the “truth claims” of science. I think of the so-called science wars as a tremendous wasted opportunity: antagonizing both sides of the divide, and blinding both sides to the many productive compatibilities that do exist. In fact, if you tune out much of that bombast, there's quite a bit in the structuralist and post-structuralist tradition that dovetails with new developments in the sciences. To give just a few examples: The underlying premise of deconstruction—that our systems of thought are fundamentally shaped and limited by the structure of language—resonates with many chapters of a book like Steven Pinker's
The Language Instinct,
despite the fact that Pinker himself has launched a number of attacks on recent cultural theory. The postmodern assumption of a “constructed reality” goes nicely with the idea of consciousness as a kind of artificial theater and not a direct apprehension of things in themselves. Semiotics and structuralism both have roots in Levi-Strauss's research into universal mythology, which obviously has deep connections to the project of evolutionary psychology. And De Landa has amply demonstrated the fundamental alliance between Deleuzian philosophy and complexity theory, an alliance that goes back to Deleuze's interest in the work of Nobel laureate (and founding complexity theorist) Ilya Prigogine.

And so in climbing the ladder of consilience, we can't afford to draw an arbitrary line at the sciences; too many productive connections exist. If McLuhan is right and media are extensions of our central nervous system, then we need a theory of the central nervous system as much as we need a theory of media; if the network technology we're creating takes the form of self-organizing systems, then we need the tools of complexity theory to make sense of those networks. But neither should we grant the sciences a de facto supremacy over the other levels in the interpretative model. In this book's argument, neuroscience arrives at several key points to explain the interaction between media and mind, but it's certainly not correct to describe my argument as ultimately reducing everything down to the firing of neurons. When you're trying to tell the story of how a hurricane came to do $50 billion worth of damage, the economic story of barrier island real estate development is just as important as the story of oceanic currents. The same goes for the story of how video games came to sharpen our minds: you need intelligence testing and narrative theory and brain imaging and economics to tell that story accurately, and none of those elements holds a trump card over the others.

It seems to me that the dialogue between the humanities and the sciences has been steadily growing in civility—and fruitful exchange—over the past decade. To my mind the most interesting work right now is work that tries to bridge the two worlds, that looks for connections rather than divisions. This is ultimately what E. O. Wilson was proposing in
Consilience
: not the annexing of the humanities by the sciences but a kind of conceptual bridge-building. In fact, I would say that the most consilient—not to mention exciting—work today has come from folks trained as cultural critics—books like Michael Pollan's
The Botany of Desire,
with its mix of Nietzsche and Richard Dawkins; the sociopolitical sections in Robert Wright's
Non Zero,
and his subsequent writings on the war on terror; Gladwell's work in both
The Tipping Point
and
Blink,
drawing on marketing theory as readily as neuropsychology. (We have also seen the arrival of the consilient blockbuster, in books like Sebastian Junger's
The Perfect Storm,
whose narrative carries the reader all the way from the macro patterns of storm systems in the Atlantic to the molecular interactions that occur in the lungs when humans drown.) My own books have, not surprisingly, explored those same hybrid connections, between the sciences of self-organization and the development of urban culture in
Emergence,
between the neuroscience of social connection and communications theory in
Mind Wide Open.
More cross-disciplinary consilience is no doubt on the way, and it won't come a minute too soon. After two decades of the science wars, we're due for a détente.