Don't kill your television

Far from making us stupid, violent and lazy, TV and video games are as good for us as spinach, says an engaging new book by Steven Johnson.

By Farhad Manjoo

May 1, 2005 | Pop culture, like fast food, gets a bad rap. It's perfectly understandable: Because we consume so much of the stuff -- we watch so much TV, pack away so many fries -- and because the consumption is so intimate, it's natural to look to our indulgence as the cause of all that ails us. Let's face it, we Americans are fat and lazy and simple-minded; we yell a lot and we've got short attention spans and we're violent and promiscuous and godless; and when we're not putting horndogs into office we're electing dumb guys who start too many wars and can't balance the budget and ... you know what I mean? You are what you eat. The output follows from the input. When you look around and all you see is Ronald McDonald and Ryan Seacrest, it seems natural to conclude that junk food and junk culture are responsible for a large chunk of the mess we're in.

The other day, though, in an unbelievably delicious turn of events, the government reported that people who are overweight face a lower risk of death than folks who are thin. While the news didn't exactly exonerate junk food, it was a fitting prelude to the publication of Steven Johnson's new polemic "Everything Bad Is Good for You," which argues that what we think of as junk food for the mind -- video games, TV shows, movies and much of what one finds online -- is not actually junk at all. In this intriguing volume, Johnson marshals the findings of brain scientists and psychologists to examine the culture in which we swim, and he shows that contrary to what many of us assume, mass media is becoming more sophisticated all the time. The media, he says, shouldn't be fingered as the source of all our problems. Ryan Seacrest is no villain. Instead, TV, DVDs, video games and computers are making us smarter every day.

"For decades, we've worked under the assumption that mass culture follows a steadily declining path towards lowest-common-denominator standards," Johnson writes. "But in fact, the exact opposite is happening: the culture is getting more intellectually demanding, not less." Johnson labels the trend "the Sleeper Curve," after the 1973 Woody Allen film that jokes that in the future, more advanced societies will come to understand the nutritional benefits of deep fat, cream pies and hot fudge. Indeed, at first, Johnson's argument does sound as shocking as if your doctor had advised you to eat more donuts and, for God's sake, to try and stay away from spinach. But Johnson is a forceful writer, and he makes a good case; his book is an elegant work of argumentation, the kind in which the author anticipates your silent challenges to his ideas and hospitably tucks you in, quickly bringing you around to his side.

In making his case for pop culture, Johnson, who was a co-founder of the pioneering (and now-defunct) Web journal Feed, draws on research from his last book, "Mind Wide Open," which probed the mysteries of how our brains function. Johnson's primary method of analyzing media involves a concept he calls "cognitive labor." Instead of judging the value of a certain book, video game or movie by looking at its content -- at the snappy dialogue, or the cool graphics, or the objectives of the game -- Johnson says that we should instead examine "the kind of thinking you have to do to make sense of a cultural experience." Probed this way, the virtues of today's video games and TV shows become readily apparent, and the fact that people aren't reading long-form literature as much as they used to looks less than dire. "By almost all standards we use to measure reading's cognitive benefits -- attention, memory, following threads, and so on -- the non-literary popular culture has been steadily growing more challenging over the past thirty years," Johnson says. Moreover, non-literary media like video games, TV and the movies are also "honing different mental skills that are just as important as the ones exercised by reading books."

Johnson adds that he's not offering a mere hypothesis for how video games and TV shows may affect our brains -- there's proof, he says, that society is getting smarter due to the media it consumes. In most developed countries, including the United States, IQs have been rising over the past half-century, a statistic that of course stands in stark contrast to the caricature of modern American idiocy. Johnson attributes intelligence gains to the increasing sophistication of our media, and writes that, in particular, mass media is helping us -- especially children -- learn how to deal with complex technical systems. Kids today, he points out, often master electronic devices in ways that their parents can't comprehend. They do this because their brains have been trained to understand complexity through video games and through TV; mass media, he says, prepares children for the increased difficulty that tomorrow's world will surely offer, and it does so in a way that reading a book simply cannot do.

Still, at times Johnson protests too much, setting up what look like straw men defenders of old media so that he can expound on the greatness of the new. It's true that many oldsters continue to say a lot of silly things about the current media environment. Johnson quotes Steve Allen, George Will, the "Dr. Spock" child-care books and the Parents Television Council, all of whom think of modern media in the way former FCC chairman Newton Minow famously described the television landscape of the early 1960s -- as a "vast wasteland." (For good measure, Johnson could also have taken a stab at opportunistic politicians like Jennifer Granholm, the Democratic governor of Michigan, who's trying to pass a state ban on the sale of violent video games to minors, or misguided liberals like Kalle Lasn, who wants vigilantes to shut off your TV.)

Yet, I suspect that most of Johnson's audience probably already gets it. I was tickled by much of what Johnson illustrates about how video games and TV affect your brain, and some of it surprised me, but I wasn't really skeptical in the first place. Most people my age -- kids who grew up at the altar of Nintendo and "Seinfeld" -- probably feel the same way. And this is to Johnson's credit: To young people, his take on media feels intuitively right. It's clear what he means when he says TV makes you think, and that video games require your brain. Indeed, if you've ever played a video game, Johnson pretty much has you at hello.

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