Everything Bad Is Good for You (31 page)

Part Two

If we're not getting these cognitive upgrades:
James Flynn and the economist William Dickens have proposed a fascinating solution for the IQ paradox, one that offers a helpful model for the gene-culture interaction that has confounded so many commentators in recent years. “People whose genes send them into life with a small advantage for these abilities start with a modest performance advantage. Then genes begin to drive the powerful engine of reciprocal causation between ability and environment. You begin by being a bit better at school and are encouraged by this, while others who are a bit ‘slow' get discouraged. You study more, which upgrades your cognitive performance, earn praise for your grades, start haunting the library, get into a top stream. Another child finds that sport is his or her strong suit, does the minimum, does not read for pleasure, and gets into a lower stream. Both of you may go to the same school but the environments you make for yourselves within that school will be radically different. The modest initial cognitive advantage conferred by genes becomes enormously multiplied.

“Once again, just as different genes are matched with very different environments, so identical genes will be matched with very similar environments. You and your separated identical twin will get very similiar scores on IQ tests at adulthood. Using [Arthur] Jensen's model, genes will get credit for all of the potent environmental influences you both share. And environment will appear so feeble that it could not possibly account for the huge IQ advantage your children enjoy over yourself. Our model shows why this is a mistake. It shows that kinship studies hide or ‘mask' the potency of environmental influences on IQ. Therefore, they do not really demonstrate the impossibility of an environmental explanation of massive gains over time.” William T. Dickens and James R. Flynn, “Heritability Estimates Versus Large Environmental Effects: The IQ Paradox Resolved,”
Psychological Review,
vol. 108, no. 2 (April 2001). A summary can be found at http://www.brookings.edu/views/ articles/dickens/200104.htm.

 

“The complexity of an individual's environment”:
Carmi Schooler, “Environmental Complexity and the Flynn Effect,” in Ulric Neisser, ed.,
The Rising Curve
(Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 1999), p. 71.

 

The
positive
mental impact of contemporary media has not been examined:
It's instructive to look at Marie Winn's 1977 book
The Plug-In Drug
in the context of the Flynn Effect. Winn's book—updated in 2002 with additional material critical of the new electronic media—was one of the key original sources of the “television is damaging our children's brains” backlash. In the twenty-fifth-anniversary edition, Winn makes a number of suspect assertions to demonstrate the damaging effects of electronic media. At one point, she admits: “Several generations of children raised watching television have come to maturity showing no signs of a downward trend in overall intelligence” (Marie Winn,
The Plug-In Drug
[New York: Penguin, 2002], p. 67). Technically, of course, this is true. There are no signs of a downward trend because there is, in fact, an
upward
trend. (The Flynn Effect goes unmentioned in the book.)

Winn's primary evidence for the “brain drain” of TV and computers is the long-term trend of declining verbal SAT scores, which she describes as dropping steadily from the mid-sixties to the early eighties, when they then flatline for the next twenty years. She sees this pattern as matching precisely the increasing hourly exposure to television during this period: the generation taking the SAT in 1980 at the very low point of the trend was the first to have been raised on television from cradle to college—and so no wonder that their verbal skills are the worst in recent memory.

Winn's numbers sound convincing, but when you look at them more closely, they strengthen the Sleeper Curve hypothesis more than her brain-drain argument. Where SAT verbals are concerned, the Sleeper Curve prediction would be: A small decline during the heyday of TV, the horrible years of
Happy Days
and
Starsky and Hutch
, followed by a steady but accelerating increase as text-driven interactive media enters the mainstream after 1985 or so.

And, in fact, that's exactly what you see: The
average
verbal SAT score flatlined from 1980 to 2000, but the performance of every single demographic group improved significantly. (Only the overall breakdown of groups changed, lowering the average.) And in the past five years, even the average is up by six points, reflecting the increased emphasis on writing and reading in the digital age.

 

One study at the University of Rochester:
“Researchers at the University of Rochester found that young adults who regularly played video games full of high-speed car chases and blazing gun battles showed better visual skills than those who did not. For example, they kept better track of objects appearing simultaneously and processed fast-changing visual information more efficiently.” Associated Press, “Fire Up That Game Boy,” May 28, 2003.

 

Another recent study looked at three distinct groups:
John Beck and Mitchell Wade,
Got Game?
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2004).

 

“Just as an elite with a massive IQ”:
James Flynn, “Massive IQ Gains in 14 Nations: What IQ Tests Really Measure,”
Psychological Bulletin,
101, no. 2 (1987), p. 187.

 

In 2003, for the first time, Hollywood made more money:
“In 1996, the year before the home DVD player was introduced, consumers spent $6 billion buying VHS tapes, and $9.2 billion renting them, with the studios taking in 75 percent of sales and 20 percent of rentals. In 2004, according to Adams Media Research, consumers will spend $24.5 billion buying and renting DVDs and VHS tapes. Almost $15 billion of that will be in DVD sales, and nearly 80 percent of that will go to the studios through their home entertainment divisions. The explosion in DVD sales has changed the calculus of the Hollywood hit. Last year, ‘Finding Nemo' sold $339.7 million in tickets when it was released to the nation's movie theaters. It went on to capture a greater amount—$431 million—in home video (including DVD) retail sales and rentals.” Ross Johnson, “Getting a Piece of a DVD Windfall,”
The New York Times,
December 14, 2004.

 

a philosophy dubbed the theory of “Least Objectionable Programming”; “We exist”:
Quoted in Thompson,
Television's Second Golden Age,
p. 39.

 

“electric speed”; “Today it is the instant speed”:
McLuhan,
Understanding Media,
p. 353.

 

“regime of competence”; “Each level dances”:
James Paul Gee, “High Score Education,”
Wired,
May 2003. The article can be found at http://www.wired.com/wired/ archive/11.05/view.html?pg-1.

 

“To engage the written word”:
Postman,
Amusing Ourselves to Death,
p. 51.

 

If the subject matter…truly had a significant impact on our behavior:
The new-media scholar David Gauntlett artfully delineates the problem with the methodology of most media violence studies: “To explain the problem of violence in society, researchers should begin with that social violence and seek to explain it with reference, quite obviously, to those who engage in it: their identity, background, character and so on. The ‘media effects' approach, in this sense, comes at the problem backwards, by starting with the media and then trying to lasso connections from there on to social beings, rather than the other way around.

“This is an important distinction. Criminologists, in their professional attempts to explain crime and violence, consistently turn for explanations not to the mass media but to social factors such as poverty, unemployment, housing, and the behaviour of family and peers. The one study that did start at what I would recognise as the correct end—by interviewing 78 teenage offenders (who had been convicted of serious crimes such as burglary and violence) and then tracing their behaviour back towards media usage, in comparison with a group of over 500 ‘ordinary' school pupils of the same age [Hagell and Newburn,
Persistent Young Offenders,
1994]—found only that the young offenders watched less television and video than their counterparts, had less access to the technology in the first place, had no particular interest in specifically violent programmes, and either enjoyed the same material as non-offending teenagers or were simply uninterested. This point was demonstrated very clearly when the offenders were asked, ‘If you had the chance to be someone who appears on television, who would you choose to be?'

“‘The offenders felt particularly uncomfortable with this question and appeared to have difficulty in understanding why one might want to be such a person…. In several interviews, the offenders had already stated that they watched little television, could not remember their favourite programmes and, consequently, could not think of anyone to be. In these cases, their obvious failure to identify with any television characters seemed to be part of a general lack of engagement with television' (p. 30).” David Gauntlett, “Ten Things Wrong with the ‘Effects Model.'” http://theory.org. uk/david/effects.htm

 

In late 2004, the Departments of Justice and Education released a joint study:
Fox Butterfield, “Crime in Schools Fell Sharply over Decade, Survey Shows,”
The New York Times,
November 30, 2004.

 

“More than any other person, Steven Spielberg”:
Kurt Andersen, “Kids Are Us,”
The New Yorker,
December 15, 1997.

Notes on Further Reading

Consilience:
In taking a consilient approach to culture, one question invariably arises: Where do you stop? If each step on the ladder connects to another level beneath it, where do you jump off? Why not go from
Zelda
's problem solving all the way down to quantum gravity? The bestseller lists in recent years have featured a number of books that display precisely that range. (Think of Sebastian Junger's
The Perfect Storm
.) For the critic of popular culture, however, the interpretative ladder has two sensible boundaries, defined by the range of human perception. The scales of reality worth exploring are those that have a material, differential effect on the cultural experience. At the very large and the very small ends of the spectrum, the effects lose relevance. A player may not realize that the video game he's immersed in is activating his dopamine system, but he will feel the effects of that system nonetheless. Some games will generate more dopaminergic activity than others, and as we've seen, games as a genre are more likely to be dopamine-friendly than other cultural forms. So it makes sense to extend our analysis down to the scale of neurochemicals. But the subatomic relationships that ultimately create the dopamine molecule itself are less relevant, because those forces remain constant throughout all brain chemistry, and because their effects are perceived only indirectly.

At the opposite end of the scale, it makes sense to analyze the macroeconomics of the video game industry, because those forces directly shape the kinds of games available to play. But the macro gravitational relationship that allows the earth to revolve around the sun doesn't warrant analysis, because it doesn't have a distinct effect on the game experience. It's true enough that the gaming industry would be dramatically transformed without the sun, but it would be transformed in exactly the same way that all life on earth would be transformed: it would be extinguished. The exact range of appropriate scales varies according to the cultural pursuit in question. If your focus is on the culture of sword-fishing, as in Junger's book, then it's entirely appropriate to widen the lens to the global scale of meteorology. But most cultural practices stop at the scale of human collectives: cities, economies, networks. You need to understand how communities now share information online in order to understand the complexity of today's video games. But you don't need to understand the Gulf Stream. As anyone who has tried his hand at this approach will tell you, cutting off the extremes of the ladder hardly limits your perspective. There's plenty of work to do in the middle.

Acknowledgments

This book differs from my previous ones in that its topic is something about which most people have already formed strong opinions. That has its benefits. The many casual conversations one has as one is writing a book turned out, this time around, to be unusually productive. In the past, most of those conversations began with a quizzical look: “You're writing a book about ants and
what
?” But whenever I broached the argument of
Everything Bad,
people would jump into the fray with their own theories about the state of pop culture. Not surprisingly, I found that parents were particularly keen to engage with the ideas. (And sometimes a little suspicious.) Those conversations ended up coloring a great deal of what I eventually wrote: opening up new avenues for exploration, and making me aware of objections that had to be dealt with. So thanks to everyone who chewed me out over a drink or during brunch or on an airplane. You were my imagined readers as I was writing this, for better or worse.

I had a handful of non-imagined readers as well who offered very helpful and supportive comments on the text: Alex Ross, Kurt Andersen, Jeff Jarvis, Henry Jenkins, Douglas Rushkoff, Esther Dyson, Christina Koukkos, Alex Star, and Alexa Robinson. My father managed to find a way to justify all those hours watching
The Sopranos
by making some timely suggestions near the end of the editing process. I am also grateful to Red Burns and George Agudow at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program for allowing me to teach a graduate seminar on video games, something no grown adult should rightfully be allowed to do. My students in that seminar were a tremendous help to me in understanding the power and intelligence of the gaming culture.

My editors at
Discover
and
Wired—
Stephen Petranek, Dave Grogan, Chris Anderson, Ted Greenwald, Mark Robinson—let me ruminate on technology and culture in ways that shaped many of the ideas here; Esther Dyson kindly gave me an entire issue of her
Release 1.0
to think about the way software interacts with the brain. I'm grateful as well to the Voices of Vision program at Caltech for inviting me to give a talk on the virtues of pop culture as I was finishing the book.

I'm indebted to my research assistant, Ivan Askwith, who did everything from transcribing book excerpts to generating my (occasionally bizarre) charts to helping me concoct entire theories of
The Sopranos'
narrative universe. I suspect we'll be hearing more from Ivan in the years to come.

What can I say about my editor at Riverhead, Sean Mc-Donald? His new editing technique is unstoppable! I don't think there's a page in this book that wasn't improved by some comment or query of his, and deeply appreciate his willingness to let the book evolve out of the form it took in the original proposal. Thanks to the whole Riverhead team—especially Julie Grau, Cindy Spiegel, Larissa Dooley, Kim Marsar, Liz Connor, and Meredith Phebus—for welcoming me into the fold, and giving me the support and encouragement I needed.

This is the first book I've written from start to finish in our new home in Brooklyn, and so I want to acknowledge the whole supporting cast that makes up the urban oasis that is Park Slope: our many neighborhood friends who dropped by unexpected to save me from a paragraph that couldn't quite find its way to closure; the coffee at Tea Lounge and Naidre's (and yes, Starbucks—everything bad truly is good for you); the hundreds—or thousands—of people who make Prospect Park the perfect spot for an afternoon stroll away from the keyboard; the kids banging away at the study door, demanding some quality time with the computer (and if necessary, with Dad too); and most of all, my wife, who makes so much of the beauty and happiness of our life possible.

But this one is for my agent, Lydia Wills, who has been in the ring with me for ten years now, and who believed in the book when even I had begun to lose faith. If she hadn't become such a superstar over those ten years I might feel as though I owed her something. As it is, I'm just happy she still returns my calls.

New York City
February 2005