Excerpt from "Everything Bad is Good for You"
By STEVEN JOHNSON
SCIENTIST A: Has he asked for anything special?
SCIENTIST B: Yes, this morning for breakfast . . . he requested something called
''wheat germ, organic honey and tiger's milk.''
SCIENTIST A: Oh, yes. Those were the charmed substances that some years ago were
felt to contain life-preserving properties.
SCIENTIST B: You mean there was no deep fat? No steak or cream pies or . . . hot
fudge?
SCIENTIST A: Those were thought to be unhealthy.
‹ From Woody Allen's ''Sleeper''
On Jan. 24, the Fox network showed an episode of its hit drama ''24,'' the real-time
thriller known for its cliffhanger tension and often- gruesome violence. Over the
preceding weeks, a number of public controversies had erupted around ''24,'' mostly
focused on its portrait of Muslim terrorists and its penchant for torture scenes. The
episode that was shown on the 24th only fanned the flames higher: in one scene, a
terrorist enlists a hit man to kill his child for not fully supporting the jihadist cause; in
another scene, the secretary of defense authorizes the torture of his son to uncover
evidence of a terrorist plot.
But the explicit violence and the post-9/11 terrorist anxiety are not the only elements of
''24'' that would have been unthinkable on prime-time network television 20 years ago.
Alongside the notable change in content lies an equally notable change in form. During
its 44 minutes -- a real-time hour, minus 16 minutes for commercials -- the episode
connects the lives of 21 distinct characters, each with a clearly defined ''story arc,'' as
the Hollywood jargon has it: a defined personality with motivations and obstacles and
specific relationships with other characters. Nine primary narrative threads wind their
way through those 44 minutes, each drawing extensively upon events and information
revealed in earlier episodes. Draw a map of all those intersecting plots and
personalities, and you get structure that -- where formal complexity is concerned -- more
closely resembles ''Middlemarch'' than a hit TV drama of years past like ''Bonanza.''
For decades, we've worked under the assumption that mass culture follows a path
declining steadily toward lowest-common-denominator standards, presumably because
the ''masses'' want dumb, simple pleasures and big media companies try to give the
masses what they want. But as that ''24'' episode suggests, the exact opposite is
happening: the culture is getting more cognitively demanding, not less. To make sense
of an episode of ''24,'' you have to integrate far more information than you would have a
few decades ago watching a comparable show. Beneath the violence and the ethnic
stereotypes, another trend appears: to keep up with entertainment like ''24,'' you have to
pay attention, make inferences, track shifting social relationships. This is what I call the
Sleeper Curve: the most debased forms of mass diversion -- video games and violent
television dramas and juvenile sitcoms -- turn out to be nutritional after all.
I believe that the Sleeper Curve is the single most important new force altering the
mental development of young people today, and I believe it is largely a force for good:
enhancing our cognitive faculties, not dumbing them down. And yet you almost never
hear this story in popular accounts of today's media. Instead, you hear dire tales of
addiction, violence, mindless escapism. It's assumed that shows that promote smoking
or gratuitous violence are bad for us, while those that thunder against teen pregnancy or
intolerance have a positive role in society. Judged by that morality-play standard, the
story of popular culture over the past 50 years -- if not 500 -- is a story of decline: the
morals of the stories have grown darker and more ambiguous, and the antiheroes have
multiplied.
The usual counterargument here is that what media have lost in moral clarity, they have
gained in realism. The real world doesn't come in nicely packaged public-service
announcements, and we're better off with entertainment like ''The Sopranos'' that
reflects our fallen state with all its ethical ambiguity. I happen to be sympathetic to that
argument, but it's not the one I want to make here. I think there is another way to assess
the social virtue of pop culture, one that looks at media as a kind of cognitive workout,
not as a series of life lessons. There may indeed be more ''negative messages'' in the
mediasphere today. But that's not the only way to evaluate whether our television shows
or video games are having a positive impact. Just as important -- if not more important - is the kind of thinking you have to do to make sense of a cultural experience. That is
where the Sleeper Curve becomes visible.
Televised Intelligence
Consider the cognitive demands that televised narratives place on their viewers. With
many shows that we associate with ''quality'' entertainment -- ''The Mary Tyler Moore
Show,'' ''Murphy Brown,'' ''Frasier'' -- the intelligence arrives fully formed in the words
and actions of the characters on-screen. They say witty things to one another and avoid
lapsing into tired sitcom cliches, and we smile along in our living rooms, enjoying the
company of these smart people. But assuming we're bright enough to understand the
sentences they're saying, there's no intellectual labor involved in enjoying the show as a
viewer. You no more challenge your mind by watching these intelligent shows than you
challenge your body watching ''Monday Night Football.'' The intellectual work is
happening on-screen, not off.
But another kind of televised intelligence is on the rise. Think of the cognitive benefits
conventionally ascribed to reading: attention, patience, retention, the parsing of
narrative threads. Over the last half-century, programming on TV has increased the
demands it places on precisely these mental faculties. This growing complexity involves
three primary elements: multiple threading, flashing arrows and social networks.
According to television lore, the age of multiple threads began with the arrival in 1981 of
''Hill Street Blues,'' the Steven Bochco police drama invariably praised for its ''gritty
realism.'' Watch an episode of ''Hill Street Blues'' side by side with any major drama
from the preceding decades -- ''Starsky and Hutch,'' for instance, or ''Dragnet'' -- and the
structural transformation will jump out at you. The earlier shows follow one or two lead
characters, adhere to a single dominant plot and reach a decisive conclusion at the end
of the episode. Draw an outline of the narrative threads in almost every ''Dragnet''
episode, and it will be a single line: from the initial crime scene, through the
investigation, to the eventual cracking of the case. A typical ''Starsky and Hutch''
episode offers only the slightest variation on this linear formula: the introduction of a
comic subplot that usually appears only at the tail ends of the episode, creating a
structure that looks like this graph. The vertical axis represents the number of individual
threads, and the horizontal axis is time.
A ''Hill Street Blues'' episode complicates the picture in a number of profound ways. The
narrative weaves together a collection of distinct strands -- sometimes as many as 10,
though at least half of the threads involve only a few quick scenes scattered through the
episode. The number of primary characters -- and not just bit parts -- swells
significantly. And the episode has fuzzy borders: picking up one or two threads from
previous episodes at the outset and leaving one or two threads open at the end.
Charted graphically, an average episode looks like this.
Critics generally cite ''Hill Street Blues'' as the beginning of ''serious drama'' native in the
television medium -- differentiating the series from the single-episode dramatic
programs from the 50's, which were Broadway plays performed in front of a camera. But
the ''Hill Street'' innovations weren't all that original; they'd long played a defining role in
popular television, just not during the evening hours. The structure of a ''Hill Street''
episode -- and indeed of all the critically acclaimed dramas that followed, from
''thirtysomething'' to ''Six Feet Under'' -- is the structure of a soap opera. ''Hill Street
Blues'' might have sparked a new golden age of television drama during its seven-year
run, but it did so by using a few crucial tricks that ''Guiding Light'' and ''General Hospital''
mastered long before.
Bochco's genius with ''Hill Street'' was to marry complex narrative structure with
complex subject matter. 'Dallas'' had already shown that the extended, interwoven
threads of the soap-opera genre could survive the weeklong interruptions of a primetime show, but the actual content of ''Dallas'' was fluff. (The most probing issue it
addressed was the question, now folkloric, of who shot J.R.) ''All in the Family'' and
''Rhoda'' showed that you could tackle complex social issues, but they did their tackling
in the comfort of the sitcom living room. ''Hill Street'' had richly drawn characters
confronting difficult social issues and a narrative structure to match.
Since ''Hill Street'' appeared, the multi-threaded drama has become the most
widespread fictional genre on prime time: ''St. Elsewhere,'' ''L.A. Law,''
''thirtysomething,'' ''Twin Peaks,'' ''N.Y.P.D. Blue,'' ''E.R.,'' ''The West Wing,'' ''Alias,''
''Lost.'' (The only prominent holdouts in drama are shows like ''Law and Order'' that have
essentially updated the venerable ''Dragnet'' format and thus remained anchored to a
single narrative line.) Since the early 80's, however, there has been a noticeable
increase in narrative complexity in these dramas. The most ambitious show on TV to
date, ''The Sopranos,'' routinely follows up to a dozen distinct threads over the course of
an episode, with more than 20 recurring characters. An episode from late in the first
season looks like this.
The total number of active threads equals the multiple plots of ''Hill Street,'' but here
each thread is more substantial. The show doesn't offer a clear distinction between
dominant and minor plots; each story line carries its weight in the mix. The episode also
displays a chordal mode of storytelling entirely absent from ''Hill Street'': a single scene
in ''The Sopranos'' will often connect to three different threads at the same time, layering
one plot atop another. And every single thread in this ''Sopranos'' episode builds on
events from previous episodes and continues on through the rest of the season and
beyond.
Put those charts together, and you have a portrait of the Sleeper Curve rising over the
past 30 years of popular television. In a sense, this is as much a map of cognitive
changes in the popular mind as it is a map of on-screen developments, as if the media
titans decided to condition our brains to follow ever-larger numbers of simultaneous
threads. Before ''Hill Street,'' the conventional wisdom among television execs was that
audiences wouldn't be comfortable following more than three plots in a single episode,
and indeed, the ''Hill Street'' pilot, which was shown in January 1981, brought
complaints from viewers that the show was too complicated. Fast-forward two decades,
and shows like ''The Sopranos'' engage their audiences with narratives that make ''Hill
Street'' look like ''Three's Company.'' Audiences happily embrace that complexity
because they've been trained by two decades of multi-threaded dramas.
Multi-threading is the most celebrated structural feature of the modern television drama,
and it certainly deserves some of the honor that has been doled out to it. And yet multithreading is only part of the story.
The Case for Confusion
Shortly after the arrival of the first-generation slasher movies -- ''Halloween,'' ''Friday the
13th'' -- Paramount released a mock-slasher flick called ''Student Bodies,'' parodying the
genre just as the ''Scream'' series would do 15 years later. In one scene, the obligatory
nubile teenage baby sitter hears a noise outside a suburban house; she opens the door
to investigate, finds nothing and then goes back inside. As the door shuts behind her,
the camera swoops in on the doorknob, and we see that she has left the door unlocked.
The camera pulls back and then swoops down again for emphasis. And then a flashing
arrow appears on the screen, with text that helpfully explains: ''Unlocked!''
That flashing arrow is parody, of course, but it's merely an exaggerated version of a
device popular stories use all the time. When a sci-fi script inserts into some advanced
lab a nonscientist who keeps asking the science geeks to explain what they're doing
with that particle accelerator, that's a flashing arrow that gives the audience precisely
the information it needs in order to make sense of the ensuing plot. (''Whatever you do,
don't spill water on it, or you'll set off a massive explosion!'') These hints serve as a kind
of narrative hand-holding. Implicitly, they say to the audience, ''We realize you have no
idea what a particle accelerator is, but here's the deal: all you need to know is that it's a
big fancy thing that explodes when wet.'' They focus the mind on relevant details: ''Don't
worry about whether the baby sitter is going to break up with her boyfriend. Worry about
that guy lurking in the bushes.'' They reduce the amount of analytic work you need to do
to make sense of a story. All you have to do is follow the arrows.
By this standard, popular television has never been harder to follow. If narrative threads
have experienced a population explosion over the past 20 years, flashing arrows have
grown correspondingly scarce. Watching our pinnacle of early 80's TV drama, ''Hill
Street Blues,'' we find there's an informational wholeness to each scene that differs
markedly from what you see on shows like ''The West Wing'' or ''The Sopranos'' or
''Alias'' or ''E.R.''
''Hill Street'' has ambiguities about future events: will a convicted killer be executed? Will
Furillo marry Joyce Davenport? Will Renko find it in himself to bust a favorite singer for
cocaine possession? But the present-tense of each scene explains itself to the viewer
with little ambiguity. There's an open question or a mystery driving each of these stories
-- how will it all turn out? -- but there's no mystery about the immediate activity on the
screen. A contemporary drama like ''The West Wing,'' on the other hand, constantly
embeds mysteries into the present-tense events: you see characters performing actions
or discussing events about which crucial information has been deliberately withheld.
Anyone who has watched more than a handful of ''The West Wing'' episodes closely will
know the feeling: scene after scene refers to some clearly crucial but unexplained piece
of information, and after the sixth reference, you'll find yourself wishing you could rewind
the tape to figure out what they're talking about, assuming you've missed something.
And then you realize that you're supposed to be confused. The open question posed by
these sequences is not ''How will this turn out in the end?'' The question is ''What's
happening right now?''
The deliberate lack of hand-holding extends down to the microlevel of dialogue as well.
Popular entertainment that addresses technical issues -- whether they are the
intricacies of passing legislation, or of performing a heart bypass, or of operating a
particle accelerator -- conventionally switches between two modes of information in
dialogue: texture and substance. Texture is all the arcane verbiage provided to convince
the viewer that they're watching Actual Doctors at Work; substance is the material
planted amid the background texture that the viewer needs make sense of the plot.
Conventionally, narratives demarcate the line between texture and substance by
inserting cues that flag or translate the important data. There's an unintentionally
comical moment in the 2004 blockbuster ''The Day After Tomorrow'' in which the
beleaguered climatologist (played by Dennis Quaid) announces his theory about the
imminent arrival of a new ice age to a gathering of government officials. In his speech,
he warns that ''we have hit a critical desalinization point!'' At this moment, the writerdirector Roland Emmerich -- a master of brazen arrow-flashing -- has an official follow
with the obliging remark: ''It would explain what's driving this extreme weather.'' They
might as well have had a flashing ''Unlocked!'' arrow on the screen.
The dialogue on shows like ''The West Wing'' and ''E.R.,'' on the other hand, doesn't talk
down to its audiences. It rushes by, the words accelerating in sync with the high-speed
tracking shots that glide through the corridors and operating rooms. The characters talk
faster in these shows, but the truly remarkable thing about the dialogue is not purely a
matter of speed; it's the willingness to immerse the audience in information that most
viewers won't understand. Here's a typical scene from ''E.R.'':
[WEAVER AND WRIGHT push a gurney containing a 16-year-old girl. Her parents,
JANNA AND FRANK MIKAMI, follow close behind. CARTER AND LUCY fall in.]
WEAVER: 16-year-old, unconscious, history of biliary atresia.
CARTER: Hepatic coma?
WEAVER: Looks like it.
MR. MIKAMI: She was doing fine until six months ago.
CARTER: What medication is she on?
MRS. MIKAMI: Ampicillin, tobramycin, vitamins a, d and k.
LUCY: Skin's jaundiced.
WEAVER: Same with the sclera. Breath smells sweet.
CARTER: Fetor hepaticus?
WEAVER: Yep.
LUCY: What's that?
WEAVER: Her liver's shut down. Let's dip a urine. [To CARTER] Guys, it's getting a little
crowded in here, why don't you deal with the parents? Start lactulose, 30 cc's per NG.
CARTER: We're giving medicine to clean her blood.
WEAVER: Blood in the urine, two-plus.
CARTER: The liver failure is causing her blood not to clot.
MRS. MIKAMI: Oh, God. . . .
CARTER: Is she on the transplant list?
MR. MIKAMI: She's been Status 2a for six months, but they haven't been able to find
her a match.
CARTER: Why? What's her blood type?
MR. MIKAMI: AB.
[This hits CARTER like a lightning bolt. LUCY gets it, too. They share a look.]
There are flashing arrows here, of course -- ''The liver failure is causing her blood not to
clot'' -- but the ratio of medical jargon to layperson translation is remarkably high. From
a purely narrative point of view, the decisive line arrives at the very end: ''AB.'' The 16year-old's blood type connects her to an earlier plot line, involving a cerebralhemorrhage victim who -- after being dramatically revived in one of the opening scenes
-- ends up brain-dead. Far earlier, before the liver-failure scene above, Carter briefly
discusses harvesting the hemorrhage victim's organs for transplants, and another
doctor makes a passing reference to his blood type being the rare AB (thus making him
an unlikely donor). The twist here revolves around a statistically unlikely event
happening at the E.R. -- an otherwise perfect liver donor showing up just in time to
donate his liver to a recipient with the same rare blood type. But the show reveals this
twist with remarkable subtlety. To make sense of that last ''AB'' line -- and the look of
disbelief on Carter's and Lucy's faces -- you have to recall a passing remark uttered
earlier regarding a character who belongs to a completely different thread. Shows like
''E.R.'' may have more blood and guts than popular TV had a generation ago, but when
it comes to storytelling, they possess a quality that can only be described as subtlety
and discretion.
Even Bad TV Is Better
Skeptics might argue that I have stacked the deck here by focusing on relatively
highbrow titles like ''The Sopranos'' or ''The West Wing,'' when in fact the most
significant change in the last five years of narrative entertainment involves reality TV.
Does the contemporary pop cultural landscape look quite as promising if the
representative show is ''Joe Millionaire'' instead of ''The West Wing''?
I think it does, but to answer that question properly, you have to avoid the tendency to
sentimentalize the past. When people talk about the golden age of television in the early
70's -- invoking shows like ''The Mary Tyler Moore Show'' and ''All in the Family'' -- they
forget to mention how awful most television programming was during much of that
decade. If you're going to look at pop-culture trends, you have to compare apples to
apples, or in this case, lemons to lemons. The relevant comparison is not between ''Joe
Millionaire'' and ''MASH''; it's between ''Joe Millionaire'' and ''The Newlywed Game,'' or
between ''Survivor'' and ''The Love Boat.''
What you see when you make these head-to-head comparisons is that a rising tide of
complexity has been lifting programming at the bottom of the quality spectrum and at
the top. ''The Sopranos'' is several times more demanding of its audiences than ''Hill
Street'' was, and ''Joe Millionaire'' has made comparable advances over ''Battle of the
Network Stars.'' This is the ultimate test of the Sleeper Curve theory: even the junk has
improved.
If early television took its cues from the stage, today's reality programming is reliably
structured like a video game: a series of competitive tests, growing more challenging
over time. Many reality shows borrow a subtler device from gaming culture as well: the
rules aren't fully established at the outset. You learn as you play.
On a show like ''Survivor'' or ''The Apprentice,'' the participants -- and the audience -know the general objective of the series, but each episode involves new challenges that
haven't been ordained in advance. The final round of the first season of ''The
Apprentice,'' for instance, threw a monkey wrench into the strategy that governed the
play up to that point, when Trump announced that the two remaining apprentices would
have to assemble and manage a team of subordinates who had already been fired in
earlier episodes of the show. All of a sudden the overarching objective of the game -- do
anything to avoid being fired -- presented a potential conflict to the remaining two
contenders: the structure of the final round favored the survivor who had maintained the
best relationships with his comrades. Suddenly, it wasn't enough just to have clawed
your way to the top; you had to have made friends while clawing. The original ''Joe
Millionaire'' went so far as to undermine the most fundamental convention of all -- that
the show's creators don't openly lie to the contestants about the prizes -- by inducing a
construction worker to pose as man of means while 20 women competed for his
attention.
Reality programming borrowed another key ingredient from games: the intellectual labor
of probing the system's rules for weak spots and opportunities. As each show discloses
its conventions, and each participant reveals his or her personality traits and
background, the intrigue in watching comes from figuring out how the participants
should best navigate the environment that has been created for them. The pleasure in
these shows comes not from watching other people being humiliated on national
television; it comes from depositing other people in a complex, high-pressure
environment where no established strategies exist and watching them find their
bearings. That's why the water-cooler conversation about these shows invariably tracks
in on the strategy displayed on the previous night's episode: why did Kwame pick
Omarosa in that final round? What devious strategy is Richard Hatch concocting now?
When we watch these shows, the part of our brain that monitors the emotional lives of
the people around us -- the part that tracks subtle shifts in intonation and gesture and
facial expression -- scrutinizes the action on the screen, looking for clues. We trust
certain characters implicitly and vote others off the island in a heartbeat. Traditional
narrative shows also trigger emotional connections to the characters, but those
connections don't have the same participatory effect, because traditional narratives
aren't explicitly about strategy. The phrase ''Monday-morning quarterbacking'' describes
the engaged feeling that spectators have in relation to games as opposed to stories. We
absorb stories, but we second-guess games. Reality programming has brought that
second-guessing to prime time, only the game in question revolves around social
dexterity rather than the physical kind.
The Rewards of Smart Culture
The quickest way to appreciate the Sleeper Curve's cognitive training is to sit down and
watch a few hours of hit programming from the late 70's on Nick at Nite or the SOAPnet
channel or on DVD. The modern viewer who watches a show like ''Dallas'' today will be
bored by the content -- not just because the show is less salacious than today's soap
operas (which it is by a small margin) but also because the show contains far less
information in each scene, despite the fact that its soap-opera structure made it one of
the most complicated narratives on television in its prime. With ''Dallas,'' the modern
viewer doesn't have to think to make sense of what's going on, and not having to think
is boring. Many recent hit shows -- ''24,'' ''Survivor,'' ''The Sopranos,'' ''Alias,'' ''Lost,''
''The Simpsons,'' ''E.R.'' -- take the opposite approach, layering each scene with a thick
network of affiliations. You have to focus to follow the plot, and in focusing you're
exercising the parts of your brain that map social networks, that fill in missing
information, that connect multiple narrative threads.
Of course, the entertainment industry isn't increasing the cognitive complexity of its
products for charitable reasons. The Sleeper Curve exists because there's money to be
made by making culture smarter. The economics of television syndication and DVD
sales mean that there's a tremendous financial pressure to make programs that can be
watched multiple times, revealing new nuances and shadings on the third viewing.
Meanwhile, the Web has created a forum for annotation and commentary that allows
more complicated shows to prosper, thanks to the fan sites where each episode of
shows like ''Lost'' or ''Alias'' is dissected with an intensity usually reserved for Talmud
scholars. Finally, interactive games have trained a new generation of media consumers
to probe complex environments and to think on their feet, and that gamer audience has
now come to expect the same challenges from their television shows. In the end, the
Sleeper Curve tells us something about the human mind. It may be drawn toward the
sensational where content is concerned -- sex does sell, after all. But the mind also likes
to be challenged; there's real pleasure to be found in solving puzzles, detecting patterns
or unpacking a complex narrative system.
In pointing out some of the ways that popular culture has improved our minds, I am not
arguing that parents should stop paying attention to the way their children amuse
themselves. What I am arguing for is a change in the criteria we use to determine what
really is cognitive junk food and what is genuinely nourishing. Instead of a show's violent
or tawdry content, instead of wardrobe malfunctions or the F-word, the true test should
be whether a given show engages or sedates the mind. Is it a single thread strung
together with predictable punch lines every 30 seconds? Or does it map a complex
social network? Is your on-screen character running around shooting everything in
sight, or is she trying to solve problems and manage resources? If your kids want to
watch reality TV, encourage them to watch ''Survivor'' over ''Fear Factor.'' If they want to
watch a mystery show, encourage ''24'' over ''Law and Order.'' If they want to play a
violent game, encourage Grand Theft Auto over Quake. Indeed, it might be just as
helpful to have a rating system that used mental labor and not obscenity and violence
as its classification scheme for the world of mass culture.
Kids and grown-ups each can learn from their increasingly shared obsessions. Too
often we imagine the blurring of kid and grown-up cultures as a series of violations: the
9-year-olds who have to have nipple broaches explained to them thanks to Janet
Jackson; the middle-aged guy who can't wait to get home to his Xbox. But this
demographic blur has a commendable side that we don't acknowledge enough. The
kids are forced to think like grown-ups: analyzing complex social networks, managing
resources, tracking subtle narrative intertwinings, recognizing long-term patterns. The
grown-ups, in turn, get to learn from the kids: decoding each new technological wave,
parsing the interfaces and discovering the intellectual rewards of play. Parents should
see this as an opportunity, not a c
Purchase answer to see full
attachment