"Everything Bad is Good for You"

(How Today's Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter)
-by steven johnson
2005
How often does a book challenge, nay change, the way you look at the world? Few of us seek such change...we're drawn to books the way we're drawn to people, choosing those who reinforce what we want to believe.
I thought i was a cutting-edge progressive. This book exposed me as a crusty conservative: "Damned TV...reality shows and thirteen CSIs! Infernal video games, stripping our youth of their social skills and conditioning them to hyper-violence! Go read a book, go outside!" Yes, that was me. And while those positions aren't entirely wrong (most reality shows worship at the altar of cutthroat narcissism, and too many shows and games desensitize us to violence), the larger charge of TV and video dumbing our culture down couldn't be more wrong. The opposite has taken place over the past fifty years - average IQs have been climbing at a steady rate. Johnson makes a compelling case that the single greatest cause is the genre-shifting leaps of complexity in TV plots and video games. The average show forty years ago involved a single plot moving forward to its own resolution. Today, we ingest cornucopias of subplots and co-plots that resolve over the course of a season (or many seasons). "Reduced attention spans"? Steven thinks not. The first video game? Pong. Now, they require weeks of intense problem-solving to master. Human brains constantly seek challenge, and the marketplace obeys that mandate, or its product dies. As for social skills, you could easily argue that books are more crippling than video games, which force players to problem-solve (and prioritize, and long-term strategize) with other online humyns. And surprise, hyper-violent games are a minority among the most successful games ever.
But wait - there's more! Reality shows force you to constantly evaluate contestants' emotional IQs, to project who will succeed or fail. In doing so, we sharpen our own social skills. And the "degradation" of politics in the TV age, where style (or looks) triumph over substance? Johnson takes the opposite view - that we now have an intimacy with politicians we were heretofore denied, which allows us to assess their emotional skills. In the era of sound bites, much is lost...but much is gained. Johnson asks whether nixon lost to kennedy not because he was ugly or nervous, but because the glare of lights revealed something intuitively untrustworthy. I'm not ready to swallow that one fully, but it's a question worth asking. The lincoln/douglas debates showed prodigious mental agility and decisiveness...yet also revealed nothing about how the candidates might run a meeting or resolve a dispute.
In an era when public schools have long been declining, how have IQs kept rising? There has to be an outside factor. Johnson points out that this cultural leap in smarts isn't affecting the visionaries, whose population percentage has remained constant, but rather the large mass in the middle of the curve. The people who watch TV and play games.
A brilliant offering, steven. Thank you for keeping us on our toes.