EVERYTHING BAD IS GOOD FOR YOU: How Popular Culture is Making Us Smarter
by Steven Johnson
Allen Lane £10, 238 pages

A friend tells me that his younger son’s world view is predicated on The Simpsons. Recently, the boy referred to the Four Elephants of the Apocalypse. His older brother corrected him: “You mean the Four Horsemen.” The younger boy hadn’t heard of the Four Horsemen, but he’d picked up the other phrase on The Simpsons. Does it matter that he learned the comic allusion and enjoyed it as something else, before he knew the term to which it referred?

To some commentators, this might be proof of how our culture is being dumbed down. But life is full of examples of information learned in the wrong, or anti-logical, order. Popular culture reflects this truth, yet it doesn’t mean that the information is valueless.

Everything Bad is Good for You is a leisurely, well-mannered polemic - what Steven Johnson himself calls “an old-fashioned work of persuasion”. Johnson makes the case that the cognitive benefits of popular culture have been underestimated. He wards off the dire prophesies of social commentators who warn that the low standards of popular culture result in a wider cultural deterioration.

Moral concerns about popular culture have become generalised: witness, for example, the Daily Mail’s campaigns against the film Crash, David Cronenberg’s take on J.G. Ballard’s violent avant-garde novel, or the bad press video games attract. Johnson labels the perceived upward trend in cognitive engagement the Sleeper Curve, after the Woody Allen mock sci-fi film where “a team of scientists from 2173 are astounded that 20th-century society failed to grasp the nutritional merits of cream pie and hot fudge”. Johnson argues that we have nothing to fear but fear itself: popular culture, far from rotting our brains, helps them to grow.

Video games are not for simpletons, says Johnson. They require and develop skills beyond the hand-eye co-ordination that even critics may concede. Video games compel because “human brains are drawn to systems where rewards are clearly defined and achieved by exploring an environment,” he says. The interactivity and open-endedness of video games are absent from books and, while most video-game characters lack the psychological depth of those in a novel, the essential value of the games is that they exercise a particular set of “mental muscles”.

For Johnson, the “probing” required to explore a gaming environment enables gamers to learn “the basic procedure of the scientific method” and what he calls “the mental labour of managing... simultaneous objectives - ‘telescoping’”. This should not, he explains, be confused with multitasking. “Multitasking is the ability to handle a chaotic stream of unrelated objectives. Telescoping is all about order, not chaos; it’s about constructing the proper hierarchy of tasks and moving through the tasks in the correct sequence. It’s about perceiving relationships and determining priorities.” Video gaming encourages an enhanced aptitude to make decisions, quite different from sitting back and receiving lessons from traditional media such as books or television.

Although a more passive activity than video gaming, television watching in the past 30 years has also made more cognitive demands on viewers. In drama, multiple threading of storylines began with Hill Street Blues in 1981. Two decades of multithreaded dramas have led to at least a doubling of this narrative complexity, as in The West Wing or The Sopranos. This applies equally to sitcoms: “Nearly every extended sequence in Seinfeld or The Simpsons... will contain a joke that makes sense only if the viewer fills in the proper supplementary information - information that is deliberately withheld from the viewer.” Even Reality TV, derided by many social commentators, engages the social mind and demands “emotional intelligence” while the social network of the terrorist drama 24 is far more complex than that of the 1970s soap Dallas, for example.

But Johnson offers no statistics about whether we have become less socialised as a result of too much television. With video games, too, he pushes the “everything in moderation” line rather than dealing with the extent to which video games have come to dominate many people’s leisure time.

The internet competes with television for our attention - US twenty-something males watch one fifth less television than they did five years ago. Unlike television, the internet is a text-based medium. “The rise of the internet,” says Johnson, “has forestalled the death of the typographic universe - and its replacement by the society of the image - predicted by [Marshall] McLuhan and [Neil] Postman.” It is also a new-found source of social connection and meta-commentary on popular culture and information in general.

Narrative film offers the least interesting territory for Johnson’s thesis. It seems to me that the plots of many mainstream Hollywood films are getting clunkier and the characters more predictable (has anyone seen The Interpreter?). The desperate need to prevent the viewer from becoming bored leaves little breathing-space for proper thought. In that regard, the film grammar of a 1970s classic such as Chinatown is, I would hazard, superior to that of a comparable film today.

In the second part of his book, Johnson addresses a wider issue. The American philosopher James Flynn has analysed IQ scores over a few decades and found that the average IQ of Americans has increased such that someone who tested in the top 10 per cent of the US in 1920 would be in the bottom third today.

Johnson believes this is due to the increased complexity and challenges of popular culture. He notes that this upward trend has coincided with a watershed development in the economics of the film and television industries: syndication re-runs and the prevalence of DVDs means that the greatest profit centre from a film or TV programme no longer comes from its initial impact on cinema screens or big networks. Its true economic value lies in its susceptibility to multiple, repeat viewings. So the theory that dominated the mindsets of network television executives in the past - characterised as “least objectional programming” - has been replaced by the “most repeatable programming”.

This book is a satisfying experience. Just when you think he’s failed to consider some aspect of his argument, Johnson will address it - he deals briefly with the alleged moral bankruptcy of popular culture or the media-savvy of today’s politicians.

Johnson concludes on an upbeat note. More and more, children are forced to think like grown-ups, while “the grown-ups get to learn from the kids: decoding each new technological wave, parsing the interfaces, and discovering the intellectual rewards of play”. For that reason, we have no reason to fear the Four Elephants of the Apocalypse.