Brain candy
Writer Steven Johnson argues that TV and video games can stimulate intellectual skills
Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter
By Steven Johnson
Riverhead, 238 pp., illustrated, $23.95
Many video games, television shows, and other forms of popular entertainment may reek of sex and violence, but what about their benefits in developing American brains?
The brain-developing benefits of pop culture?
That the very question seems preposterous is the backdrop of Steven Johnson's iconoclastic and captivating ''Everything Bad Is Good for You." In fact, he says, it's the public's overly righteous preoccupation with sexual and violent content that is diverting attention from pop culture's important contribution to Americans' cognitive development.
During the past 30 years, as Johnson abundantly documents, video games and TV shows have become mind-dazzlingly more complex. Hence, ''Pac-Man" has yielded to ''SimCity" (the urban-management simulator that is the most popular video game of all time) and ''Grand Theft Auto" (a limitless excursion through a vast city environment). ''Starsky and Hutch" has given way to ''The West Wing" and ''24."
Although example rigging could skew his argument wrongly, Johnson builds a convincing case that popular games and shows have generally grown more cognitively taxing. To be sure, plenty of schlock still appears on TV. But today's schlock is better than yesterday's, Johnson suggests. In one comparison he pits ''Battle of the Network Stars" vs. ''Joe Millionaire." If the former promoted only mind-numbing passivity, ''Joe Millionaire," for all its silliness, at least compels next-day ''water-cooler conversations" about the competitors' decisions and strategy, Johnson notes, seemingly drawing only on his seat-of-the-pants impressions.
The greater complexity, Johnson argues, is ''creating minds that are more adept at certain kinds of problem solving." Thus, he says, today's pop culture is ''largely a force for good: enhancing our cognitive faculties, not dumbing them down."
His perspective as someone who came of age as video-game technology and the Internet emerged may provide peculiar insights. Johnson, who is 36, admits to being a video-games junkie during his 20s. A decade ago, he co-founded the now-defunct online magazine FEED. His column about technology appears in Discover magazine. Another book that he authored, ''Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life," was a bestseller last year.
''Everything Bad Is Good for You" is a lucid tour of the pop-culture landscape, and Johnson makes a sometimes rambling but altogether lively guide. Video ''games are good at novelistic storytelling the way Michael Jordan was good at playing baseball," he says, in an aptly stated qualification to his central theme. ''Both could probably make a living at it, but their world-class talents lie elsewhere."
The book's sweepingly assertive title ought to have an asterisk attached as a warning about the extent to which Johnson qualifies his argument. He does see risks, for example, if children watch too much television or play too many video games. And some cultural works ''are more rewarding than others," he writes, acknowledging that good literature ought to command people's attention, too.
As for the sex and violence in the entertainment media, Johnson contends that the risks to public morals and decency are overstated. ''Next time you hear someone complaining about violent TV mobsters, or accidental onscreen nudity, or the inanity of reality programming, or the dull states of the
Further, media violence may actually function as a ''safety valve for kids who might otherwise be inclined to express their aggression in the real world," Johnson says, echoing a familiar point. Despite the increasingly violent content of the mass media in the past decade, he notes, the nation's crime rate has been falling.
''Parents and peer groups," he adds, ''are still vastly more influential where values are concerned than Tony Soprano or the carjackers of 'Grand Theft Auto.' "
To buttress his point that pop culture is improving Americans' minds, Johnson cites the rising average scores of Americans on IQ tests in recent decades. The play -- maybe work is the word -- involved to win at some of the hottest-selling video games demands the same sort of head-scratching and analytical acumen needed to crack an algebra problem, as he depicts it.
''To locate the items, you need the pearl of Din from the islanders," he begins, in illustrating the initial steps in one stage of the latest ''Zelda" game, ''The Wind Walker," where the objective is rescuing your sister. ''To get this, you need to help them solve their problem. To do this, you need to cheer up the Prince. To do this, you need to get a letter from the girl. To do this, you need to find the girl in the village." Spelling out all the steps to complete the one stage requires nearly three pages.
Likewise, complex television shows such as ''The West Wing" and ''24" possess a narrative sophistication that ''can only be described as subtlety and discretion," according to Johnson. In each episode, crucial plot elements are deliberately withheld, and Byzantine subplots introduced one week can fade away only to surface without warning weeks later.
Johnson's argument that the whole thrust of pop culture is having the effect of enlarging Americans' mental capacity is, of course, a giant theoretical leap. Just as decades of inquiry into the effect of TV violence on the nation's youth is yet to produce a consensus among experts, no argument that pop culture is making Americans smarter is likely to be conclusive. Johnson's book, nonetheless, provokes smarter thinking about the right questions to ask in the first place.
Joseph Rosenbloom is a senior correspondent for The American Prospect. 