Full Disclosures

Next Thursday, November 4, I'll be giving a speech at CalTech in Pasadena as part of their Voices Of Vision series. (It starts at eight, and is free and open to the public -- directions here.) The title for the speech is Everything Bad Is Good For You: Why Today's Pop Culture Is Making Our Kids Smarter. I don't normally plug speeches in this space, but I thought I'd make an exception for this one, because this talk will be the first time I've spoken publicly about my new book. And I didn't want to talk about it to a bunch of strangers at CalTech without mentioning it here first.

So, yes, there's a new book coming out next spring, called Everything Bad Is Good For You. (The subtitle is still up in the air.) Riverhead is publishing it in the US; Penguin in the UK. I'm in the middle of revisions now, with probably another couple months of edits and fine tuning ahead of me. But it's in pretty good shape, I think.

Unlike my first three books, which were all to varying degrees intellectual travelogues with me as a kind of tour guide ("let me travel with you through the world of emergence, or neuroscience, and show you the interesting landmarks"), Everything Bad is a pure work of persuasion, an old-fashioned polemic. It's shorter than the others, and barely has any chapters, and I'm not really introducing the reader to outside experts as the last two have. It's just me trying to marshal all the evidence I can to persuade the reader of a single long-term trend: that popular culture on average has been steadily growing more complex and cognitively challenging over the past thirty years. The dumbing-down, instant gratification society assumption has it completely wrong. Popular entertainment is making us smarter and more engaged, not catering to our base instincts.

I call this long-term trend the Sleeper Curve, after that famous Woody Allen joke from his mock sci-fi film where a team of scientists from 2029 are astounded that 20th-century society failed to grasp the nutritional merits of cream pies and hot fudge. (In conversation, I sometimes describe this book as the Atkins diet for pop culture.) Over the course of the book, I look at everything from Grand Theft Auto to "24," from Finding Nemo to "Dallas," from "Hill Street Blues" to "The Sopranos," from "Oprah" to "The Apprentice." There's some material about the internet, too, though less than you might suspect. (And I'm pretty sure the word "blog" never appears -- imagine that!) The critical method I've concocted for making the argument is one of my favorite things about the book -- it draws a little on narratology, a little on brain science, a little economics and media criticism, a dash of social network theory. But it tries to yoke all those disciplines together in a consistent and unified way. Or at least I think it does.

So there you go. Obviously I've got much more to say about it, and a few questions to ask. But in the meantime, if you are in the LA area, come out and hear this talk and let me know how the argument sounds in person.

Comments

[Welsed]

Millions of americans are sitting in front of televisions, aware, and totally unaware of the subtle side effects of what they are doing. However, I think the point seems to be that pop culture has taught our internal systems to functioning at a higher state of reaction, consciousness, and over all physical functionality. Sure, you have you're over indulgent, which probably accounts for most of us. Far and few between have I ever known of a saint, and I aint one of em.

Vulgar, mysoginistic rap music? No, I think that is impart from the advertising age, turning artists into bill boards, and rightfully so, for those that have chosen that. But it seems to be my opinion that, Steven is addressing the fundamentals of an upgrade. An upgrade that has been fostered by pop culture as we view it in our perspectives. I would agree, but I don't think it has made us smarter. Only adapted us to a system, unbenown to us during its inception, that takes away from a more traditional flow of reality. However, the argument is a good one, combining nostalgia, with hope for advancement in this upgrade of consciousness. Its all in how we can adapt our brains to handle the stress with out overload.

What is your view on that Steven? How do we address the overload issue? Capacity, & mind space before a human cracks it?

[Shannon Clark]

I think that "pop culture" is fragmenting and segmenting in lots of directions. Much of this segmentation is age related, some of it socio-economic.

Games - whether on or offline would seem to me to be an area ripe for your thesis. Consider the Air Force ads that are running "we've been waiting for you" - i.e. some of the same hair-trigger game playing honed instincts are what are also needed to pilot modern fighter jets.

Likewise increasing comfort with technology means that people whose technical skills are honed searching google and using IM to plan after school activities are also going to be well prepared for the modern workplace. Think IBM's ad campaigns focusing on "Change happens"

As well, if you listen to a wide range of rap/hiphop music (to address a prior comment) you will see that many very popular artists are increasingly bending genres, incorporating sounds from around the globe, and that many are not mysogonist at all (and indeed many are women). Pop culture as well seems, at least to this observer and focusing on the US mostly - though all culture these days has a global component - to be getting increasingly complex and genre crossing.

Consider the "Country" music special about to air - on "Country Outlaws" - featuring Kid Rock amongst the musicians (better known from other genres).

Or consider the growing cultural influence in the US from Japan - Manga, pokemon, etc.

The shame of it - in my opinion - is that while culture (even pop culture) has grown diverse and celebrates intelligence and creativity - other forces in the US are resisting - some religious conservatives but even more so I think the baby boomers who take a very different view on pop culture than do the youth (or somewhat surprisingly it might be argued seniors who may have more in common with today's youth than with the baby boomer generation).

One argument you might explore is the transition from the broadcast TV and landline phone culture of the baby boomers to the 500+ channel, Internet, email, IM, cell phone culture of today's youth. Seniors may also be more text oriented than the baby boomers - having grown up writing letters and listening to the radio (which tends to foster more creativity than TV you might argue). Much of modern culture is increasingly textual - but also time-shifted.

From the baby boomer perspective this may seem chaotic, random, unplanned, unfocused. But for today's youth (I'm 30 - so somewhat on the leading edge but I've had a computer at home for over 20 years) text more so than voice is the medium of choice - and creativity and creation is rewarded alongside group identification.

Anyway just some thoughts - I look forward to the book - when do you expect it to see print?

Shannon

[Artie]

"The dumbing-down, instant gratification society assumption has it completely wrong. Popular entertainment is making us smarter and more engaged, not catering to our base instincts."

Well, you've got your work cut out for you if you really want to prove that, although I suspect you're just being controversial to sell a few books.

Woody Allen would probably disagree with your premise if he could tear himself away from the conjugal embrace of his adopted daughter long enough to read it.

The instant gratification set has given us vulgar, misogynist rap music and high schoolers who can't find Canada on a map. About half of registered voters bother to show up at the polls. Jon Stewart is the most repected person in journalism, and he's a comedian.

There's Fox News.

We have millions of obese Americans sitting in front of televisions watching the Home Shopping Network as they stuff themselves with processed junk and wash it down with chemical laden sugar water.

I'm guessing Virginia Postrel is writing the jacket blurbs?

Artie

[Sergiy Grynko]

Hey, Steve. I have a question, if you don't mind. I've recently finished reading Andy Clark's "Natural-Born Cyborgs", where he explores the notion of cognitive plasticity, drawing heavily on the ideas of "The Don" Norman and Daniel Dennett. It seemed to explain a lot of things that other cognitive theories don't (such as why getting organized makes a difference, for example). But I can't figure out where it fits in the broader notion-space. Do you talk about any of the above three people in your book? Are they even on your horizon? What do you think of them? Thanks in advance.

[Su]

Great theme! And the comments move me to read the book. What about a translation to portuguese?
regards,
Su

[shawnz]

I'm interested in hearing the talk about your latest book, but I might not be able to get to Thursday's event. Are you doing any other talks in the LA area?

Thanks

[Roger]

An interesting idea which intrigues me as well. It may be true, but it also seems that the arts (qua art) have been going straight down hill during the same period - particularly film. While the Finding Nemos are great and, yes, intelligent popular entertainment, the Fellinis, Truffauts, De Sicas, Bergmans and Bunuels of another era have virtually disappeared. I think other art forms (music comes to mind) are in considerable decline as well. As for the novel... eh...

[Alexander Pope]

It sounds like a wonderfully interesting and controversial idea to write about, and I'll be first in line to buy it (loved Emergence... otherwise I wouldn't be here obviously).

I support the idea that there are some amazing and obvious examples of pop culture which are mentally challenging, but there doesn't seem to be any reason to call these instances of mental acuity either a general trend or an absolute sum greater than the instances of less than rewarding pop culture. There is more money spent on "mental fluff" movies every year. There is more money spent on "mental fluff" music every year. There is more money spent on "mental fluff" books every year, too. In sheer numbers, the country is choosing stupider and stupider entertainment.

There is a flipside to this, and it is probably the one to which you (Steve and many people fortunate enough to have fallen into the enlightened yuppie class that makes up the blog reading/writing, high iq toting, and new economy expanding minority) have been more exposed to than the majority of the population who are the ones contributing the most to America's decline. There are the fringes which have become more and more intelligent, questioning, and challenging than any society since antiquity and the renaissance (yes, I did just compare you to Plato and Da Vinci, go ahead smile;). These fringes are becoming more challenging every second, but numbers wise, they are insignificant. If they were significant, they would be the ones bringing in advertising dollars, not the ones who have to have campaigns to save them from being cut even after they win major critical awards (e.g., Arrested Development).

A book which I'm 99% sure you've read but might have overlooked is Stephen Jay Gould's "Full House." It's thesis doesn't 100% revoke what you've done by any means, but I think reading or rereading it might spur you to take a look at harder data than just the fact that there are a small and slowly growing number of fringe entertainment outlets which are intelligent, challenging, and creative. Total numbers are what matter if you're going to make an "overall" or trend statement.

[stevenberlinjohnson]

"Full House" is one of those books I keep coming back to -- and I've thought about it a lot in the context of Everything Bad. (I actually think it's just as relevant to the political situation right now, but that's another story.) But as you'll see in the book, I am very much talking about the mass culture, not the fringes. I'm talking about the top 20 on the Nielsen charts and the top-selling videogames, not the cult classics. (The cults are bigger now, too, which is great, but that's another story.) I have many side-by-side comparisons in the book -- including a lot of charts that try to capture the structural complexity of these forms -- but for now, just think about the change from PacMan to GrandTheftAuto, or from "Dallas" to "24," from "All In The Family" to "The Simpsons." Not in terms of the quality of the show, or its message, but purely the number of things you have to keep track of on your own to make sense of each episode. There's a huge leap in complexity in all those cases, even though they're all very mainstream hits by any standard.

thanks for the kind words about emergence, by the way!

sbj

[stevenberlinjohnson]

Great thoughts and suggestions, everyone. A couple of quick comments. First, the trend I'm looking at is really the increase in analytic work and problem solving that you have to do to make sense or participate in the media you're consuming. Obviously, games are a huge part of this. (They are all about problem-solving and decision-making.) But television is trending in this direction as well, if you look at the complexity of threads and social relationships -- and the lack of audience handholding -- in shows like 24, Sopranos, West Wing, even the reality shows.

Because I'm looking at problem-solving, I don't really talk about music, which has a different (and to me more mysterious) effect on our cognitive faculties. Certainly the Billboard top 20 over the past few years has not been as impressive as it has in the past, though it's also been much worse at various points in the late eighties and seventies, I'd wager. Rap is a whole issue unto itself; yes, there's lowest-common-denominator material there, but then there's things like Eminem's Mosh, which is, in my book at least, an absolutely stunning work of popular protest, particularly as a music video...

Sergiy, I haven't read Andy Clark, sound very interesting. And Shawnz, I'll be back to LA I'm sure for the book tour in the spring, but probably not until then.

[stevenberlinjohnson]

Also, I'm very glad to hear some people disagree strongly with the premise -- I worried a little that the reaction would be: "Of course. We know that already."

sbj

[Artie]

Sergiy wrote: "Today, roughly half the US population realizes that they are being manipulated. What portion of the population was it during the Red Scare? If there is a difference between the two figures, what do you think accounts for it?"

I can accept your suggestion that the US populace as a whole might be somewhat more informed on average than it was during the cold war. I don't know how you'd prove it, but it seems plausible.

But there's no correlation - as Steven suggests - between the consumption of "complex, cognitively challenging" television and video games and these "smarter" people. I would suggest that if we are indeed smarter and more informed, we are that way in spite of popular culture, particularly televsion and video games.

Despite cheap, ubiquitous broadband and cable television, a majority of Americans, including a large proportion of the culture- and media-savvy punditry, insist that Saddam Hussein was behind the 9-11 attacks. Maybe if Rush Limbaugh had spent a few years with Nintendo he'd be asking why neither Kerry or Bush is the best man to lead this nation.

We have an epidemic of obesity in large part because "complex, cognitively challenging" television advertising has hypnotized large segments of the population into thinking that brightly packaged soft drinks and processed animal fat are good for you.

I can accept that TV and video games have created larger numbers of tech-savvy savants who can manipulate the various media with greater speed and dexterity. But to suggest that popular culture does not appeal to "base" instincts is just plain disengenuous.

Grand Theft Auto. Howard Stern. Internet porn. Whatever noble, higher instincts Oprah might be able to arouse in the 12 minutes between commercials is completely negated by the flood of "complex, cognitively challenging" garbage on the other 300 channels.

Artie

[Sergiy Grynko]

I have to disagree with Alexander Pope, too. Maybe the seventies and eighties were particularly enlightened (I don't really know), but compared to half a century ago, the North American mainsteam is a lot smarter. Consider the whole Red Scare fiasco. Looking at some of the footage from those days, it doesn't seem much different from what's going on the States right now -- except back then the propaganda held even less water, and a lot more people bought it.

Today, you have terror alert levels and Dick Cheney telling people that they're going to die unless he's in charge. Back then, you had bomb drills at schools, home-made bomb shelters and whoever-was-in-charge telling people that the evil commies are going to nuke them any moment now. To put that into perspective, at the same time as the American populace was being whipped up into a paranoid frenzy, the Soviet populace was being encouraged to feel pride in the Union and to feel pity for the misguided capitalists next door.

And to make things worse, back then the premises were a lot less plausible than today. When trying to use the visage of terrorists to scare people, you can at least draw on the fact that there had been, in very recent history, a major terrorist attack on US soil. When trying to use the visage of nuclear armageddon, one would think that you'd be a little embarassed by the fact that your nation was the only one that ever used nuclear weapons against innocent civilians. But apparently that wasn't a problem for a lot of people. In other words, politicians back then arguing that the USSR was going to nuke the US was like, today, Osama bin Laden warning the moslem world that Americans would hijack 747s and slam them into middle eastern landmarks.

Today, roughly half the US population realizes that they are being manipulated. What portion of the population was it during the Red Scare? If there is a difference between the two figures, what do you think accounts for it?

P.S. what's up with the change in ability to comment? When I posted my first comment to this same entry, I could do it anonymously. Now I had to sign in, and also had to use Internet Explorer instead of my usual browser.

[Craniac]

So..does this have anything to do with our perceptions of the residents of the Red States?