Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

I just finished Steve Johnson's new book, Everything Bad is Good for You, and not only do I think it'll climb the best-seller lists, I'll be glad when it does. [Disclosure: The book comes out May 5. Steve sent me bound galleys because we bonded at a conference last year. I was a major fan of his well before that.]

EBIGFY is a persuasive essay. Forget the didactic assignments you got in English class. I've been reading Steve's stuff for some time now and I think I've discovered what makes his writing style so good: He thinks well. He turns corners and pulls you with him. It's the kind of unexpected unfolding that makes narratives work, but Steve does it purely in the realm of ideas. He writes so well because he's so damn smart. (Also, he just writes so damn well.)

This short new book has a strong and simple premise: Pop culture is making us smarter. The bulk of the book argues that pop culture is more complex than it used to be and more than we usually give it credit for. Look past the content of video games and TV, Steve says, and you'll see that their structures are far more complicated and demanding than ever before. (Deadwood should be his new favorite example.) He graphs the complexity of social relationships in Dynasty and 24, for example, and shows that the former is like a family while the latter is like a village. In following 24, we get better at understanding complex social relationships. He compares Hill Street Blues, the first mainstream multi-storyline prime-time show, with Starsky and Hutch before it and The Sopranos after it. There is no doubt: We've gotten far better at parsing interwoven plot lines and making sense of plots that aren't laid out for us like mackerels. Likewise, video games, he says, have gotten a bad rap because of their content, while once again their structure has been ignored. They teach us how to make decisions in complex environments, he says. Steve's quite wonderful at analyzing precisely the ways in which games, tv shows, and, to a lesser degree, movies demand more from us than before -- his examples of "multiple threading, flashing arrows, and social networks," for example, are so insightful that they're funny.

There's no doubt in my mind that Steve is right about that. But does pop complexity make us smarter? Here he gets more speculative, suggesting that the rise in the average IQ might well be correlated with the way our culture is training us to be more actively intelligent. The causality is hard to prove, and Steve proceeds properly tentatively. We certainly have gotten smarter at following entertainments. Does that mean that we've gotten smarter outside of watching TV and playing video games? Or are we only better at following the new rules of TV narrative and video play? Common sense and intuition make me think that Steve is right: The complexifying of pop culture is making us smarter. But then I look at the election results and wonder. We seem more impatient with nuance than ever before in the political realm. Is pop culture training us to be smarter about anything except pop culture?

So, if it's a persuasive essay, am I persuaded?

1. That pop culture is getting more complex and requires more involvement to understand? 100%.

2. That this is making us smarter outside of pop culture? I lean that way but I'm not 100% convinced. Steve acknowledges the difficulty of proving either the fact or the causality.

3. That we should be more positive about pop culture? Definitely. Even so, I think Steve occasionally underplays the value of the old media that compete for our time. Although he's careful to say that he is not claiming books have less value than games and TV, I think for rhetorical purposes he doesn't give books their due. Despite an hilarious few pages about how books would look if video games had come first, books do something that video games, TV, theater and films don't do very well: Show us the world as it appears to someone else. Those media let us view how people different from us act in the world as it appears to them, but only in books do we actually live in that world. This, as Richard Rorty has pointed out, has moral value. Steve refers to this quality of books briefly at the end, but it struck me as ass-covering. And he misses the opportunity to talk about it while developing his argument. For example, in Part One he writes:

Most video games take place in worlds that are deliberately fanciful in nature, and even the most realistic games can't compare to the vivid, detailed illusion of reality that novels or movies concoct for us. But our lives are not stories, at least in the present tense - we don't passively consume a narrative thread....Traditional narratives have much to teach us, of course: they can enhance our powers of communication, and our insight into the human psyche. But if you were designing a cultural form explicitly to train the cognitive muscles of the brain..." (p. 58 of the non-final bound galleys)

To my mind, that seriously underplays the value of books and narratives. Great novels reveal a world; calling that an "illusion" misses the point, like saying Rembrandt's portraits look like their subjects and leaving it at that. To my way of thinking, the most important lesson of narratives isn't that they give insight into our psyches or teach us how to communicate but that they show us that events unfold: The end was contained in the beginning but not in a way that we could have predicted. Narrative is about ambiguity and emergence, and I suspect that Steve, the Brown-educated, lit-crit scholar and author of Emergence - buy it today! - knows that. Had he kept that aspect of books in mind during the section on video games, for example, his point about the complex hierarchy of aims in the game Zelda would have been less convincing. Sure, we make decisions in games based on a nested stack of goals, and we learn the rules of the virtual worlds we're exploring. But those goals and rules are ultimately knowable and completely expressible. Although Half Life 2 is, as Steve points out, far more complex than the previous generation's Pac-Man, for all its amazing physics and integrated puzzles and pretty good pixelated acting, HL2 gives us a toy world. The world of Emma Bovary, on the other hand, doesn't resolve to rules and puzzles. It's messy, ambiguous, and truly complex. Of course Steve knows this, but he underplays it when pointing out the hidden complexity of video games.

Now, Steve is not asking us to decide between books and contemporary pop culture. He obviously loves books. He wants to defend pop culture by pointing out values in its structure that we've missed as we've focused on its often-offensive content. And this he does brillliantly. And entertainingly. This book is so much fun to read. All I'm saying is that in making his case, he undervalues the old culture, which might otherwise have taken just a couple of lumens off the buff-job he's done on the new one.