Everything Bad Is Good for You (29 page)

Part One

“Ours is an age besotted with graphic entertainments”:
George Will, “Reality Television: Oxymoron.” http://www.townhall.com/columnists/georgewill/gw20010621.shtml.

 

Perhaps most famously, players of Dungeons & Dragons:
“Dungeons and Dragons was not a way out of the mainstream, as some parents feared and other kids suspected, but a way back into the realm of story-telling. This was what my friends and I were doing: creating narratives to make sense of feeling socially marginal. We were writing stories, grand in scope, with heroes, villains, and the entire zoology of mythical creatures. Even sports, the arch-nemesis of role-playing games, is a splendid tale of adventure and glory. Though my friends and I were not always athletically inclined, we found agility in the characters we created. We fought, flew through the air, shot arrows out of the park, and scored points by slaying the dragon and disabling the trap. Our influence is now everywhere. My generation of gamers—whose youths were spent holed up in paneled wood basements crafting identities, mythologies, and geographies with a few lead figurines—are the filmmakers, computer programmers, writers, DJs, and musicians of today.” Peter Bebergal, “How ‘Dungeons' Changed the World,”
The Boston Globe,
November 15, 2004.

 

Sometimes…helpful to imagine culture as a…man-made weather system:
To be sure, television shows and video games are not water molecules; they come into the world thanks to the passions and talents of individual humans.
Hill Street Blues
needed its Steven Bochco, SimCity its Will Wright. These biographical explanations are not without value, but they are only part of the story. (And of course they are already ubiquitous in the mass media's coverage of themselves, in magazine profiles and newspaper reviews.) But when you're trying to explain macro trends in the history of culture, auteur theory gets you only so far. If Steven Bochco hadn't been around to invent the multithreaded serious drama, someone else would have come along to do it: the economic and technological conditions were too ripe for such an opportunity to be missed.

“Economic and technological conditions” sounds like the neo-Marxist-school cultural materialists, translating each artifact back to the “ultimately determining instance” of material history. But while the cultural materialists did important work in shedding the biographical limits of aesthetic criticism—relating works to their historical moment, and not the vicissitudes of individual genius—they remained too dependent on the symbolic architecture of ideological critique. The work of culture connected to the “economic and technological conditions” the way a mask conveys the face beneath it: representing some common features while distorting others. History churns out a steady progression of new social and technological relations, and culture floats above that world, translating its anxieties and contradictions into a code that, more often than not, makes that experiential turmoil more tolerable to the people living through it. For the kind of criticism at work in this book, on the other hand, the cultural work doesn't attempt to resolve symbolically the contradictions unleashed by historical change. The cultural work is the residue of historical change, not an imagined resolution to it.

 

Instead, you hear dire stories:
Consider this representative sample of the Trash TV mentality:

“It isn't just nags or fanatics who are disturbed by the harsh new face of TV programming in the late 1990s. Here's what the New York Times had to say in an April 1998 front-page story: ‘Like a child acting outrageously naughty to see how far he can push his parents, mainstream television this season is flaunting the most vulgar and explicit sex, language, and behavior that it has ever sent into American homes.' A banner headline in the Wall Street Journal warned not long ago…‘It's 8 p.m. Your Kids Are Watching Sex on TV.' U.S. News summarized the trends this way: ‘To hell with kids—that must be the motto of the new fall TV season…. The family hour is gone…. The story of the fall line-up is the rise of sex. Will the networks ever wise up?'

“A wide spectrum of Americans are appalled by what passes for TV entertainment these days. A 1998 poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that fully two-thirds of all parents say they are concerned ‘a great deal' about what their children are now exposed to on television. Their biggest complaint is sexual content, followed closely by violence, and then crude language.” Karl Zinsmeister, “How Today's Trash Television Harms America,”
American Enterprise,
March 1999.

 

“All across the political spectrum”:
Steve Allen, “That's Entertainment?”
The Wall Street Journal,
November 13, 1998.

 

“The entertainment industry has pushed”:
Parents Television Council. (The passage was found in the past at the Council's website, http://www.parentstv.org/.)

 

“The television sitcom is emblematic”:
Suzanne Fields, “Janet and a Shameless Culture,”
The Washington Times,
February 2, 2004.

 

“The student of media soon comes to expect”:
Marshall McLuhan,
Understanding Media
(Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1994), p. 199.

 

“The best that can be said of them”:
Benjamin Spock and Steven J. Parker,
Dr. Spock's Baby and Child Care
(New York: Pocket Books, 1998), p. 625.

 

“People who read for pleasure”:
Andrew Solomon, “The Closing of the American Book,”
The New York Times,
July 10, 2004. Solomon is a thoughtful and eloquent writer, but this essay by him contains a string of bizarre assertions, none of them supported by facts or common sense. Consider this passage: “My last book was about depression, and the question I am most frequently asked is why depression is on the rise. I talk about the loneliness that comes of spending the day with a TV or a computer or video screen. Conversely, literary reading is an entry into dialogue; a book can be a friend, talking not at you, but to you.” Begin with the fact that most video games contain genuine dialogue, where your character must interact with other onscreen characters, in contrast to books, in which the “dialogue” between reader and text is purely metaphorical. When you factor in the reality that most games are played in social contexts—together with friends in shared physical space, or over network connections—you get the sense that Solomon hasn't spent any time with the game form he lambastes. So that by the time he asserts, “Reading is harder than watching television or playing video games,” you have to ask: Which video game, exactly, is he talking about? Certainly, reading
Ulysses
is harder than playing
PacMan,
but is reading Stephen King harder than playing
Zelda
or
SimCity?
Hardly.

 

Invariably these stories point to…manual dexterity or visual memory:
I don't dwell on the manual dexterity question here, but it's worth noting how the control systems for these games have grown strikingly more complex over the past decade or so. Compare the original
Legend of Zelda
(July 1987), on the original NES, to the current
Zelda,
on the GameCube (March 2003). In sixteen years, games have changed as follows:

So what does the rhinoceros actually look like?
Henry Jenkins has painted perhaps the most accurate picture of the rhinoceros of pop culture over the past decade. “Often, our response to popular culture is shaped by a hunger for simple answers and quick actions. It is important to take the time to understand the complexity of contemporary culture. We need to learn how to be safe, critical and creative users of media. We need to evaluate the information and entertainment we consume. We need to understand the emotional investments we make in media content. And perhaps most importantly, we need to learn not to treat differences in taste as mental pathologies or social problems. We need to think, talk, and listen. When we tell students that popular culture has no place in classroom discussions, we are signaling to them that what they learn in school has little to do with the things that matter to them at home. When we avoid discussing popular culture at the dinner table, we may be suggesting we have no interest in things that are important to our children. When we tell our parents that they wouldn't understand our music or our fashion choices, we are cutting them off from an important part of who we are and what we value. We do not need to share each other's passions. But we do need to respect and understand them.” “Encouraging Conversations About Popular Culture and Media Convergence: An Outreach Program for Parents, Students, and Teachers, March–May 2000.” http://web.mit.edu/ 21fms/www/faculty/henry3/resourceguide.html.

 

Consider the story of Troy Stolle:
Julian Dibbell, “The Unreal-Estate Boom,”
Wired,
January 2003.

 

Collateral learning in the way of formation:
John Dewey,
Experience and Education
(London: Collier, 1963), p. 48.

 

“probe, hypothesize, reprobe, rethink”:
James Paul Gee,
What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy.
(New York: Palgrave, 2003), p. 90.

 

But another part involves the viewer's “filling in”:
There's an old opposition that McLuhan introduced in the early sixties between hot and cool media. I confess that I have long found these categories to be the least useful in the McLuhan canon; there's something counterintuitive about them, something that runs against the grain of the experience they're trying to describe. Hot and cool are defined by the extent to which the audience has to “fill in” the details to complete the information being conveyed. As a medium grows in resolution—and particularly resolution targeted at a specific sense—it requires less participation from the audience, and becomes “hotter” in the process. “A hot medium allows of less participation than a cool one, as a lecture makes for less participation than a seminar, and a book for less than a dialog,” McLuhan writes in
Understanding Media
(p. 22). He saw television as a cool medium, partly because of the low resolution of the image itself, and its mosaic style of presenting information. Books, by contrast, were supposed to be hot, and you were left with the unconvincing premise that TV viewers performed more mental labor “filling in” the details than book readers did. Most people, I suspect, would describe it the other way around: books force you to fill in practically everything, because you need to imagine the setting and characters, rather than have them force fed to you through the packaged sound and image on the screen. To me, what's useful in McLuhan's analysis is not hot versus cool, but rather this idea of filling in.

 

Multiple threading is the most acclaimed structural convention:
For an informative overview of the rise of the multithreaded drama, see Robert J. Thompson's
Television's Second Golden Age
(Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1997).

 

The total number of active threads equals the number of multiple plots of
Hill Street
:
The plotlines of
The Sopranos
and
Hill Street Blues
episodes are as follows:

 

The Sopranos

Christopher's murder

Christopher's screenplay

Conflicts with Uncle Junior

Carmela's frustration

Conflicts with Aunt Livia

Dr. Melfi and Tony

Trouble with the government

Family's finding out what Tony does