Everything Bad is Good for You

A while back, I wrote a review on a book titled Reality is Broken (by Jane McGonigal). If you didn't read it or don't remember, the book is about video games, and how they can positively impact the people who play them. Jane McGonigal's goal in writing the book was to help dispel the negative image associated with video games and to try to get people to incorporate the positive aspects of gaming into their everyday lives.

While writing that review, I discovered a similar book, called Everything Bad is Good for You (by Steven Johnson), and the idea intrigued me so much, I decided to buy it and read it as well. Johnson's book, which was written a few years ago, is about Pop Culture in general, and how it's actually making people smarter.

Johnson splits his book up into two sections, and the first section is further split up into different categories of media: video games, television, movies, the internet and digital technology. In each of these subsections, he details how the medium has gotten more and more complicated in recent years, giving anecdotal evidence of the how the changes are causing us to use our minds more as we ingest our entertainment, contrary to the 'rotting brain' image that is so popular among people who like to think they know what they're talking about.

I really loved that this book started with a quote by Marshall McLuhan (a man I'll want to look more into in the coming weeks):

The student of media soon comes to expect the new media of any period whatever to be classed as pseudo by those who acquired the patterns of earlier media, whatever they may happen to be.

This quote verbalizes something that I've been thinking for a long while. Basically, people are prejudice towards anything new, different, or unfamiliar. I believe the idea is that, while we were busy evolving, this trait helped us to survive; the homo sapiens who rejected or killed other people or animals that looked different were more likely to survive than those who wanted to be friendly to the invading strangers.

This trait has continued to be prevalent in people. I'm sure when the printing press was invented, hundreds of rich intellectuals bemoaned that the new machine would kill some of the 'soul' of the handwritten manuscripts. When telephones started to get popular, I'm sure there were thousands of local newspaper editorials on how people were losing the ability to interact socially face-to-face. When kids started getting into the Swing, I know that their parents shook their collective heads and tried their hardest to forbid their children from going to 'wild dance parties'.

"How disgraceful! Just you wait until your father gets home, young lady!"

So it makes perfect sense that people still have a negative view about video games, television, and so on. What Steven Johnson is attempting to do with this book is get us to overcome our natural prejudices. He makes it perfectly clear that he doesn't think video games or TV should replace other important habits, like reading or experiencing the world for yourself, but he doesn't want people to be so afraid for the future generations.

A lot of what he had to say in this book was stuff I've already been thinking to myself. His section on video games was primarily about the decision-making strategies kids are learning while playing them, along with goal setting and other things kids have to practice for in real life. Having quite a bit of experience with video games, I already knew about all this; however, I loved the way he explained it in the book. I felt like he was able to express the feelings of gamers in a way that even a non-gamer would understand.

His section on the internet was also pretty obvious to me. He focused on the idea that, with so much new technology coming out so fast, people nowadays have been trained to probe and figure out new systems quickly. That skill, though learned from a computer, isn't limited to technological systems; someone highly skilled in that area could enter a new college system with ease, or learn the system at their workplace with less training than someone who wasn't used to figuring out new technology.

What really stunned me, however, was his subsection on television. We never used to watch much television in my house (in fact, we went almost ten years without cable, surviving solely of our own bunny-ears), so I agreed with most people that television is a mind-numbingly passive activity, especially compared to playing video games (a highly active mental tasks).

It turns out that there is a lot of thinking going on, just to follow what's happening on screen. On any given episode of any given drama, there are so many different characters that the viewer has to constantly by aware of. What happens in the episode affects every character differently, but the viewer wont pick up on that if they're unable to remember who all of the characters are. This is especially noticeable in shows like 24, where there are over 30 characters to consider and over ten subplots to follow. If you forget some of these, certain scenes wont make sense, and the show will be hard to follow - and yet 24 has had some of the highest ratings on television.

I was also surprised when he pointed out the decrease in something he calls 'flashing arrows'. These are devices in shows or movies designed to help the audience follow what's going on - the music playing when the bad guy arrives on scene, or the geologist having to explain how the layers of the earth work to the obligatory non-geologist characters, just so the audience can follow along. It's a trick story-tellers have used since before film was invented, and one that modern television shows are phasing out.

I personally love stories where I don't quite know what's going on. There's no passivity in that; as the audience, I'm actively working on deciphering what I'm reading or seeing as I'm seeing it. According to Johnson, this lack in 'flashing arrows' has become more and more common on TV in the past decades. He talks extensively about The West Wing (Which I've never seen), and then gives us a page of dialogue from one scene in ER. For the entire scene, the doctors rush around, treating a young emergency patient while calming the parents down. A typical audience member, unless they were in medical school, would have no idea what the doctors were talking about; instead, they understand that they have to figure it out, using the very few clues given (the calming words said to the parents). This technique wouldn't fly twenty years ago.

I've noticed this while watching Bones, a forensic show that I've followed for a few years now. Normally, the main character will discover some important clue on the bones she's examining, and after telling her FBI partner what it is she sees, he'll ask her to dumb it down for him (effectively making it so we can understand what's going on). I remember one particular episode a few years back, however, where after she explains what's going on using anthropological jargon, I immediately thought to myself 'oh, I know what that means'. Without doing any research on my own, I unintentionally picked up

The second part of Johnson's book goes over everything he told us, making it more applicable. He explains something called the Flynn Effect, discovered by James R. Flynn, who found that, on average, IQ scores have been increasing for a long time. The official IQ test is constantly adjusted, to make sure 100 is still the average score, but that means that people who took the test twenty years ago will score lower on the test.

Another study shows that test scores are rising even more dramatically than Flynn thought.

Johnson doesn't cite this as proof of his theory, that our popular culture is making it smarter, but he sees that the two trends (rising IQ scores and the rising complexity in our media) go hand in hand. Pop culture nowadays is much more mentally challenging because that's what consumers want. If people didn't love the mental challenge, shows like 24 or ER wouldn't have such high ratings, and games like Portal and Civilization would be such bestsellers.

I found it hard to argue with any of the thoughts presented in this book, but even if someone were to try to prove him wrong, they'd be missing the point. Johnson wants to help people get over their prejudice of new and different things by pointing out all the positive aspects to things that are immediately looked down upon by people unfamiliar with them.

Altogether, the book was very interesting to read. I've been a longtime advocate for the idea that 'these days aren't any worse than previous days', so I was very open to everything he suggested, but I would really recommend it to anyone who thinks they might not agree with him. While most of his evidence in anecdotal, he does pull from neuroscience and other technical fields to show his reader exactly what he thinks is going on. Even if you find you don't believe him for some reason, it's hard to ignore the real changes going on around us today