The Sleeper Curve, Part 3

Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter
by Steven Johnson

(Page 3 of 3)

The approach followed in this book is more systemic than symbolic, more about causal relationships than metaphors. It is closer, in a sense, to physics than to poetry. My argument for the existence of the Sleeper Curve comes out of an assumption that the landscape of popular culture involves the clash of competing forces: the neurological appetites of the brain, the economics of the culture industry, changing technological platforms. The specific ways in which those forces collide play a determining role in the type of popular culture we ultimately consume. The work of the critic, in this instance, is to diagram those forces, not decode them.

Sometimes, for the sake of argument, I find it helpful to imagine culture as a kind of man-made weather system. Float a mass of warm, humid air over cold ocean water, and you'll create an environment in which fog will thrive. The fog doesn't appear because it somehow symbolically reenacts the clash of warm air and cool water. Fog arrives instead as an emergent effect of that particular system and its internal dynamics. The same goes with popular culture: certain kinds of environments encourage cognitive complexity; others discourage complexity. The cultural object-the film or the video game-is not a metaphor for that system; it's more like an output or a result.

The forces at work in these systems operate on multiple levels: underlying changes in technology that enable new kinds of entertainment; new forms of online communications that cultivate audience commentary about works of pop culture; changes in the economics of the culture industry that encourage repeat viewing; and deep-seated appetites in the human brain that seek out reward and intellectual challenge. To understand those forces we'll need to draw upon disciplines that don't usually interact with one another: economics, narrative theory, social network analysis, neuroscience.

This is a story of trends, not absolutes. I do not believe that most of today's pop culture is made up of masterpieces that will someday be taught alongside Joyce and Chaucer in college survey courses. The television shows and video games and movies that we'll look at in the coming pages are not, for the most part, Great Works of Art. But they are more complex and nuanced than the shows and games that preceded them. While the Sleeper Curve maps average changes across the pop cultural landscape-and not just the complexity of single works-I have focused on a handful of representative examples in the interest of clarity. (The endnotes offer a broader survey.)

I believe that the Sleeper Curve is the single most important new force altering the mental development of young people today, and I believe it is largely a force for good: enhancing our cognitive faculties, not dumbing them down. And yet you almost never hear this story in popular accounts of today's media. Instead, you hear dire stories of addiction, violence, mindless escapism. "All across the political spectrum," television legend Steve Allen writes in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, "thoughtful observers are appalled by what passes for TV entertainment these days. No one can claim that the warning cries are simply the exaggerations of conservative spoil-sports or fundamentalist preachers. . . . The sleaze and classless garbage on TV in recent years exceeds the boundaries of what has traditionally been referred to as Going Too Far." The influential Parents Television Council argues: "The entertainment industry has pushed the content envelope too far; television and films filled with sex, violence, and profanity send strong negative messages to the youth of America-messages that will desensitize them and make for a far more disenfranchised society as these youths grow into adults." And then there's syndicated columnist Suzanne Fields: "The television sitcom is emblematic of our culture; parents, no matter what their degree of education, have abandoned the simplest standard of shame. Their children literally 'do not know better.' The drip, drip, drip of the popular culture dulls our senses. An open society with high technology exposes increasing numbers of adults and children to the lowest common denomination of sex and violence." You could fill an encyclopedia volume with all the kindred essays published in the past decade.

Exceptions to this dire assessment exist, but they are of the rule-proving variety. You'll see the occasional grudging acknowledgments of minor silver linings: an article will suggest that video games enhance visual memory skills, or a critic will hail The West Wing as the rare flowering of thoughtful programming in the junkyard of prime-time television. But the dominant motif is one of decline and atrophy: we're a nation of reality program addicts and Nintendo freaks. Lost in that account is the most interesting trend of all: that the popular culture has been growing increasingly complex over the past few decades, exercising our minds in powerful new ways.

But to see the virtue in this form of positive brainwashing, we need to begin by doing away with the tyranny of the morality play. When most op-ed writers and talk show hosts discuss the social value of media, when they address the question of whether today's media is or isn't good for us, the underlying assumption is that entertainment improves us when it carries a healthy message. Shows that promote smoking or gratuitous violence are bad for us, while those that thunder against teen pregnancy or intolerance have a positive role in society. Judged by that morality play standard, the story of popular culture over the past fifty years-if not five hundred-is a story of steady decline: the morals of the stories have grown darker and more ambiguous, and the anti-heroes have multiplied.

The usual counterargument here is that what media has lost in moral clarity it has gained in realism. The real world doesn't come in nicely packaged public service announcements, and we're better off with entertainment that reflects that fallen state with all its ethical ambiguity. I happen to be sympathetic to that argument, but it's not the one I want to make here. I think there is another way to assess the social virtue of pop culture, one that looks at media as a kind of cognitive workout, not as a series of life lessons. Those dice baseball games I immersed myself in didn't contain anything resembling moral instruction, but they nonetheless gave me a set of cognitive tools that I continue to rely on, nearly thirty years later. There may indeed be more "negative messages" in the mediasphere today, as the Parents Television Council believes. But that's not the only way to evaluate whether our television shows or video games are having a positive impact. Just as important-if not more important-is the kind of thinking you have to do to make sense of a cultural experience. That is where the Sleeper Curve becomes visible. Today's popular culture may not be showing us the righteous path. But it is making us smarter.

Copyright © 2005 Steven Johnson, published by Riverhead Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., all rights reserved, reprinted with permission from the publisher.

About the Author

Steven Johnson is the author of the national bestsellers Everything Bad Is Good for You and Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life, as well as Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software and Interface Culture: How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate.