Saw this pop-science/pop-culture author last March on "The Colbert Report," promoting his latest book, The Invention of Air (2008), ambitiously subtitled, "A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America." It's really all about Joseph Priestley, who has been a hero of mine for a number of reasons, and for a goodly number of years. Long library waiting-list. Just got it a couple of weeks ago, and a review is to follow in the fullness of time.Meanwhile, I got hold of his earlier book, Everything Bad Is Good For You (2005), subtitled, almost as ambitiously, "How Today's Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter." Johnson's study of what I'll over-simply call "techno-culture" and it's effect on our collective gray-matter IS good for you, and will make you smarter and--this is most important--less guilty about the time you and/or your kids spend on playing video-games or watching television.
Johnson's got some science to back that up, but first, he got me hooked early on when he explains his central thesis by coining a metaphor from a Woody Allen movie!--
... popular culture has, on average, grown more complex and intellectually challenging over the past thirty years. Where most commentators assume a race to the bottom and a dumbing down--"an increasingly infantilized society," in George Will's words-- I see a progressive story: mass culture growing more sophisticated, demanding more cognitive engagement with each passing year ... making our minds sharper, as we soak-in entertainment usually dismissed as so much lowbrow fluff. I call this upward trend the Sleeper Curve, after the classic sequence from Woody Allen's mock sci-fi film, where a team of scientists from 2173 are astounded that twentieth-century society failed to grasp the nutritional benefits of cream pies and hot fudge.
That's the author's only reference to the movie--he assumes probably correctly that most of his readership would've seen it, or at least heard about that "classic sequence." However, it's just too good not to share more fully with the Myriad Readers. Sleeper (1973) is perhaps my favorite from Allen's early, "mainly-funny-with-some-social-satire" period. Here one of Woody's trademark "schlemiel" characters, Miles Monroe, is brought back from an accidental cryonic state 2oo years into the future. His former diet was a regimen of all the hippie food-fads of the day; in fact, to hammer the point home unmercifully, Allen has him working at a health-food store! After thawing him out, two scientist-doctors discuss the morning after, all the while puffing on their cigarettes:
--For breakfast he requested something called "wheat germ, organic honey, and tiger's milk."
--Oh yes [chuckling]. Those are the charmed substances that some years ago were thought to contain life-preserving properties.
--You mean there was no deep fat? No steak or cream pies or ... hot fudge?
--Those were thought to be unhealthy ... precisely the opposite of what we know to be true.
--Incredible.
Or later when, after they advise him to be sure to inhale deeply on a proffered cigarette, Miles confronts them with his confusion:
--Where am I anyhow? I mean, What happened to everybody? Where are all my friends?
--You must understand that everyone you knew in the past has been dead nearly 200 years.
--But they all ate organic rice!
This is the author's Sleeper Curve. Video-games bad? Nope. Turns out they're good for you after all. They are only one aspect of an intellectually rich, high-tech landscape through which a modern 10-year-old navigates: "shifting effortlessly from phone to IM to e-mail in communicating with friends; probing and telescoping through immense virtual worlds; adopting and troubleshooting new media technologies without flinching." That last was written before likes of Twitter and FaceBook (etc.) came into prominence, which can only further his point. Compare all of this to the rather simple-minded recreational toys and games of the past, and again you get his point. New stuff make brain good.
Public classrooms may be overcrowded and teachers underpaid--traditional test scores continue to go down--but outside of school kids' brains are developing sophisticated problem-solving skills. And IQ scores continue to go up. That's right: over the past 50 years Americans have improved by about 15 points, half of that in the last couple of decades. Johnson believes the paradox is solved when we look at what IQ tests test: problem solving, abstract reasoning, pattern recognition, spatial logic--a sufficiency of all of which is to be found in modern media technology. Q.E.D.
Even prime-time television has become more intellectually rigorous over the last couple of decades, Johnson believes. And I like his take on it. Ever since Hill Street Blues, he says (to paraphrase), a story-arc with multiple plot-threads has been de rigueur for the most successful sitcoms--popularly and critically--from Simpsons to Seinfeld to my current favorite, Scrubs. (Though I might contend that it really got started with shows like All In the Family and Mary Tyler Moore.) No longer "present tense" from one episode to the next, where the bare-bones "situation" was enough for the viewer to "get" the joke--Three's Company, Home Improvement--the newer shows require external references, an accumulated context that the audience must draw upon in order to be in the know. (That's why they're so popular in reruns: the viewers already have their ready-made "insider's playbook") Johnson points out Sam's past drinking-problem in Cheers, for example, or George Costanza's made-up character/entity "Art Vandelay," who appears in several episodes of Seinfeld. And I'll add the notorious "Master of My Domain" episode which keeps coming back in the form of "self-denial" in-jokes throughout the rest of the series.
Finally, and incidentally, my kids came up and along a bit before the monster techno-media revolution--somewhat ahead of the Sleeper Curve--but the author cites various fantasy and role-playing games as possible precursors to that revolution. One of those he mentions is Dungeons and Dragons, to which my first three sons were devoted player-aficionados. As far as I know, they never gave it up. I guess that's why they're so very, very smart. Or not.
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