Illustration by Jillian Tamaki.
Although he wears a turtleneck sweater under a blazer in his author photo, Steven Johnson is actually a pretty smart guy. With his late-’90s forum for online essays, Feed (currently on long-term hiatus), and the cultural commentary site he co-founded, Plastic.com, Johnson helped usher in the age of the blog. Since then, the Brooklyn-based writer has made a career writing non-fiction books (like Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software) that link the worlds of science, academia and culture. Now 36, Johnson has just released his fourth book, Everything Bad Is Good For You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter. Over a quick 199 pages, Johnson argues that so-called stupid pastimes like playing video games and watching television aren’t rotting our minds; instead, games like Age of Empires and shows like Alias are actually improving our mental faculties.
A: I had been batting around an idea for a book of collected essays. I knew I wanted the opening to be about video games because I had this sense people were not understanding, on some basic level, how hard they are. A lot of people still think video games are like Pac-Man. And I was going to do a bunch of other contrarian pieces. I thought, well, I’ll do something about television, because television has become so much better and nobody talks about that. In fact, in the States there’s been this huge debate about television. It’s between two sides: one side thinks television, and pop culture in general, is so bad the Feds need to intervene; the other side just thinks pop culture is bad. When I started refuting [those positions], what was supposed to be a collection of disjointed essays actually turned into the most linear of my books.
Q: The title seems to refute the conventional wisdom that all mass media needs to be dumb.
A: In the ’70s, television became this mass thing, where 99 per cent of the homes had a TV. It got pretty dumb: Happy Days, Joanie Loves Chachi, Starsky and Hutch – all terrible television. Programmers were trying to capture the attention of the most people – but not offend them in any way. A programmer at NBC at the time called this “the theory of least objectionable programming.” That was the goal. When you’re in a mass medium, you tend to go for lowest common denominator.
But I disagree with the assumption that people will always opt for the least challenging thing, that people are innately slackers when it comes to media. If that were true, the history of video game programming would produce games that were ever more simple to complete. But in fact, the opposite has happened. Games are more challenging than they’ve ever been. Because people enjoy being challenged.
A: We do think of video games as being a central component of today’s pop culture. When people do the litany of complaints about how everything has become stupid, gaming is always part of that litany. My book is saying that one of the major things you’re complaining about – video games – are actually really rich in terms of the cognitive demands they place on the people who play them.
Q: You say television is growing more complex because we’ve been trained to deal with that complexity – by television itself, as well as interactive media. But how much of that increase in complexity comes from the fact that TV is no longer a mass medium? Thanks to digital cable and satellite television, in the last decade, TV has become a precisely targeted product aimed at small demographic niches. So perhaps some shows just happen to target the niche of smarter viewers – and that’s why they are more complex.Courtesy Penguin Group.
A: A couple of things to say about that. When Hill Street Blues aired in 1981, people complained because they thought it was too hard to understand. Despite incredible critical reviews the show had a tough time finding an audience, and in fact, in 1985, they fired [producer Steven] Bochco and deliberately made the show simpler to understand. Today, Alias, 24 and The Sopranos are far more complicated than Hill Street ever was. So I think you have to acknowledge something has changed in people’s minds, allowing them to follow these more complicated shows. There’s a chart I have in the book that tracks social relationships in an episode of 24 compared to an episode of Dallas. So 24, in one episode, will often have 25 characters with this incredible web of complex relations. Dallas was, like, three times simpler. And I suspect what has happened is that the more interactive forms [of media] – the video games and the internet and other things – have played an active role in terms of enhancing our mental faculties. Television has caught up with that.
A: That’s an interesting theory. I’ve never thought about it that way. Maybe that’s right. But I would think there are actually fewer intelligent people watching TV now because the intelligent people are all, you know, writing on their weblog or something.
A: It depends. There’s such a huge difference between reading, you know, Middlemarch and reading a paperback romance novel. And between playing Quake and SimCity, say. But OK, I won’t quibble. I would say reading books and playing video games are equally beneficial, roughly and in distinct ways. And movies and TV are trailing behind those, although it depends on the television show or the movie.
Author Steven Johnson. Photo Nina Subin. Courtesy Penguin Group.
A: Making decisions. Trying to figure out where your priorities should be. And then you also have keeping track of social networks – who is getting along with whom, and who isn’t, and who you should invite over to dinner. All that sort of thinking – your social and emotional intelligence.
A: Actually, I think the best shows for developing emotional intelligence come from reality TV, like The Apprentice and Survivor.
A: Well, from the tropical island I’d buy with the proceeds… No, it’s funny you ask that, because I have a friend, a literary novelist, and he said, “I hate you because the only reason most people buy literary novels is because they feel guilty about watching too much TV. Now they won’t feel guilty, so they’ll never buy another literary novel.” But in the unlikely event that my book changes the course of cultural media history and people stop reading books, then I would write a very angry polemic about how reading’s endangered, in an effort to get more people to read.
Everything Bad Is Good For You is published by Riverhead Books and will be in Canadian bookstores starting May 10.
Christopher Shulgan is a Toronto writer.
