Everything Bad Is Good for You?
Posted on May 12, 2005
Just when you thought you had reached your limit of having yet another expert tell you that everything you do is bad for you, along comes a new book that pooh-poohs all the experts. Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter by Steven Johnson is here to make you feel better about all your bad habits including gaming and TV watching.
A New Yorker article by Malcolm Gladwell, called "Brain Candy," explains Johnson's unique theory.
As Johnson points out, television is very different now from what it was thirty years ago. It's harder. A typical episode of Starsky and Hutch, in the nineteen-seventies, followed an essentially linear path: two characters, engaged in a single story line, moving toward a decisive conclusion. To watch an episode of Dallas today is to be stunned by its glacial pace-by the arduous attempts to establish social relationships, by the excruciating simplicity of the plotline, by how obvious it was. A single episode of The Sopranos, by contrast, might follow five narrative threads, involving a dozen characters who weave in and out of the plot. Modern television also requires the viewer to do a lot of what Johnson calls "filling in," as in a Seinfeld episode that subtly parodies the Kennedy assassination conspiracists, or a typical Simpsons episode, which may contain numerous allusions to politics or cinema or pop culture.But it's not just watching TV that's gotten harder. Games are harder, too.
Twenty years ago, games like Tetris or Pac-Man were simple exercises in motor coordination and pattern recognition. Today's games belong to another realm. Johnson points out that one of the "walk-throughs" for "Grand Theft Auto III"-that is, the informal guides that break down the games and help players navigate their complexities-is fifty-three thousand words long, about the length of his book. The contemporary video game involves a fully realized imaginary world, dense with detail and levels of complexity.
So, let's see if we've got this straight. Playing computer games and watching TV are more difficult than the activities pursued by those who lived before TV was invented. We're smarter than people of 100 years ago whose entertainment might have consisted of playing easy games like chess, reading Plato in the original Greek and enjoying Shakespeare's plays. Got it.