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Executive Times |
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2005 Book Reviews |
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Everything
Bad Is Good For You by Steven Johnson |
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Rating: ••• (Recommended) |
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Click on
title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Contrary It won’t take
too many pages for the B.S. detector of most readers to start clicking loudly
while reading Steven Johnson’s new book, Everything
Bad Is Good For You. Despite the generality of the title, Johnson’s
premise focuses more narrowly: things like video games and watching
television develop our brains and are helping us develop our cognitive
skills. Before you let the kids watch unlimited television and play video games
with abandon, read this book, and decide where you agree or disagree with
Johnson. Depending on your personal experiences with video and computer games
and television, you’re likely to find plenty of places to both agree and
disagree. Here’s an excerpt, from part II, pp.
179-184: Pop culture’s race
to the top over the past decades forces us to rethink our assumptions about
the base tendencies of mass society: the Brave New World scenario,
where we’re fed a series of stupefying narcotics by media conglomerates
interested solely in their lavish profits with no concern for the mental
improvement of their consumers. As we’ve seen, the Sleeper Curve isn’t the
result of media titans doing charitable work; there’s an economic incentive
in producing more challenging culture, thanks to the technologies of
repetition and meta-commentary. But the end result is the same: left to its
own devices, following its own profit motives, the media ecosystem has been
churning out popular culture that has grown steadily more complex over time.
Imagine a version of Brave New World where soma and the feelies make you smarter, and you get the
idea. If the Sleeper Curve turns
the conventional wisdom about mass culture on its head, it does something
comparable to our own heads—and the truisms we like to spread about them.
Almost every Chicken Little story about the declining standards of pop
culture contains a buried blame-the-victim message: Junk culture thrives
because people are naturally drawn to simple, childish pleasures. Children
zone out in front of their TV shows or their video games because the mind
seeks out mindlessness. This is the Slacker theory of brain function: the
human brain desires above all else that the external world
refrain from making it do too much work. Given their druthers, our
brains would prefer to luxuriate among idle fantasies and mild amusements.
And so, never being one to refuse a base appetite, the culture industry
obliges. The result is a society where maturity, in Andrew Solomon’s words,
is a “process of mental atrophy.” These are common enough
sentiments, but they contain a bizarre set of assumptions if you think about
them from a distance. Set aside for the time being the historical question
of why IQs are climbing at an accelerating rate while half the population
wastes away in mental atrophy. Start instead with the more basic question of
why our brains would actively seek out atrophy in the first place. The Brave New World critics
like to talk a big game about the evils of media conglomerates, but their
world-view also contains a strikingly pessimistic vision of the human mind. I
think that dark assumption about our innate cravings for junk culture has it
exactly backward. We know from neuroscience that the brain has dedicated
systems that respond to—and seek out—new challenges and experiences. We are a
problem-solving species, and when we confront situations where information
needs to be filled in, or where a puzzle needs to be untangled, our minds
compulsively ruminate on the problem until we’ve figured it out. When we
encounter novel circumstances, when our environment changes in a surprising
way, our brains lock in on the change and try to put it in context or
decipher its underlying logic. Parents can sometimes be
appalled at the hypnotic effect that television has on toddlers; they see
their otherwise vibrant and active children gazing silently, mouth agape at
the screen, and they assume the worst: the television is turning their child
into a zombie. The same feeling arrives a few years later, when they see
their grade-schoolers navigating through a video game world, oblivious to the
reality that surrounds them. But these expressions are not signs of mental
atrophy. They’re signs of focus. The toddler’s brain is constantly
scouring the world for novel stimuli, precisely because exploring and
understanding new things and experiences is what learning is all about. In a
house where most of the objects haven’t moved since yesterday,
and no new people have appeared on the scene, the puppet show on the television
screen is the most surprising thing in the child’s environment, the stimuli
most in need of scrutiny and explanation. And so the child locks in. If you
suddenly plunked down a real puppet show in the middle of the living room, no
doubt the child would prefer to make sense of that. But in most ordinary
household environments, the stimuli onscreen offer the most diversity and
surprise. The child’s brain locks into those images for good reason. Think about it this way:
if our brain really desired to atrophy in front of mindless entertainment,
then the story of the last thirty years of video games—from Pong to The
Sims—would be a story of games
that grew increasingly simple over time. You’d never need a guidebook or a
walk-through; you’d just fly through the world, a demigod untroubled by
challenge and complexity. Game designers would furiously compete to come out
with the simplest titles; every virtual space would usher you to the path of
least resistance. Of course, exactly the opposite has occurred. The games
have gotten more challenging at an astounding rate: from PacMan’s
single page of patterns to Grand Theft Auto III’s
53,000-word walk-through in a mere two decades. The games are growing
more challenging because there’s an economic incentive to make them more
challenging—and that economic incentive exists because our brains like to
be challenged. If our mental appetites
draw us toward more complexity and not less, why do so many studies show that
we’re reading fewer books than we used to? Even if we accept the premise that
television and games can offer genuine cognitive challenges, surely we have
to admit that books challenge different, but equally important, faculties of
the mind. And yet we’re drifting away from the printed page at a steady rate.
Isn’t that a sign of our brains gravitating to lesser forms? I believe the answer is
no, for two related reasons. First, most studies of reading ignore the huge
explosion of reading (not to mention writing) that has happened thanks to
the rise of the Internet. Millions of people spend much of their day staring
at words on a screen: browsing the Web, reading e-mail, chatting with
friends, posting a new entry to one of those 8 million blogs.
E-mail conversations or Web-based analyses of The Apprentice are not
the same as literary novels, of course, but they are equally text-driven.
While they suffer from a lack of narrative depth compared to novels, many
online interactions do have the benefit of being genuinely two-way
conversations: you’re putting words together yourself, and not just
digesting someone else’s. Part of the compensation for reading less is the
fact that we’re writing more. The fact that we are
spending so much time online gets to the other, more crucial, objection: yes,
we’re spending less time reading literary fiction, but that’s because we’re
spending less time doing everything we used to do before. In fact, the
downward trend that strikes the most fear in the hearts of Madison Avenue and
their clients is not the decline of literary reading—it’s the decline of
television watching. The most highly sought demographic in the country—
twenty-something males—watches almost one-fifth less television than they
did only five years ago. We’re buying fewer CDs; we’re going out to the
movies less regularly. We’re doing all these old activities less because
about a dozen new activities have become bona fide mainstream pursuits in the
past ten years: the Web, e-mail, games, DVDs, cable on-demand, text chat.
We’re reading less because there are only so many hours in the day, and we
have all these new options to digest and explore. If reading were the only
cultural pursuit to show declining numbers, there might be cause for alarm.
But that decline is shared by all the old media forms across the board. As
long as reading books remains part of our cultural diet, and as long
as the new popular forms continue to offer their own cognitive rewards,
we’re not likely to descend into a culture of mental atrophy anytime soon. Throughout Everything
Bad Is Good For You, Johnson throws out something likely to be
controversial, uses some neuroscience evidence to lean support, and then
moderates his extreme views a bit. While readers may often reflect along the
lines of “B.S.” or “that can’t possibly be true,” Johnson will make you think
about your judgments of what is good or bad for you and others. Steve Hopkins,
July 25, 2005 |
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ã 2005 Hopkins and Company, LLC The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the August 2005
issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/Everything
Bad Is Good For You.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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