Everything Bad Goes Public

This Sunday's New York Times Magazine features a generously long excerpt from my new book, Everything Bad Is Good For You, which should be trickling into bookstores over the next week or so. (You can pre-order on Amazon as well.) The Times Mag excerpt is a condensed version of the TV section from the book, and they've given it the nicely in-your-face title, "Watching TV Makes You Smarter." My editors there were kind enough to let the piece retain the argumentative feel of the book itself, and suggest the wider scope of the book beyond television, so I couldn't be happier with the way it has turned out.

A few folks who read the book in manuscript form have asked why we didn't use the videogame sections as the excerpt. I'm very proud of the gaming material, and hope it will spark some additional research and thinking that builds on what I've written, but I think going with television was the best bet for the Times Magazine, mainly because I wager there's a sizable portion of their audience that simply won't read a piece about video games, while they might be tempted by a contrarian-sounding piece about TV.

But the idea for the book did really start with games, and so as a way of launching the book on the blog, I thought I'd quote from one of my favorite (and one of the oldest) riffs in the book. It's a little thought experiment that comes near the beginning, trying to get around the traditional prejudice that assumes that reading is invariably "good for you" and that games are mostly a waste of time.

[Added 4/26 after reading innumerable confused responses online] WARNING: What follows is Satire. I do not personally believe what is written below. It is an imagined rendition of what some pompous, self-satisfied gamer would say about books had he never actually sat down and read one. It's designed to make you realize how selective and short-sighted most of the criticism about gaming is. So if it seems selective and short-sighted in its description of books, that's precisely the point.

"Imagine an alternate world identical to ours save one techno-historical change: videogames were invented and popularized before books. In this parallel universe, kids have been playing games for centuries –– and then these page-bound texts come along and suddenly they're all the rage. What would the teachers, and the parents, and the cultural authorities have to say about this frenzy of reading? I suspect it would sound something like this:

Reading books chronically under-stimulates the senses. Unlike the longstanding tradition of gameplaying –– which engages the child in a vivid, three-dimensional world filled with moving images and musical soundscapes, navigated and controlled with complex muscular movements –– books are simply a barren string of words on the page. Only a small portion of the brain devoted to processing written language is activated during reading, while games engage the full range of the sensory and motor cortices.

Books are also tragically isolating. While games have for many years engaged the young in complex social relationships with their peers, building and exploring worlds together, books force the child to sequester him or herself in a quiet space, shut off from interaction with other children. These new 'libraries' that have arisen in recent years to facilitate reading activities are a frightening sight: dozens of young children, normally so vivacious and socially interactive, sitting alone in cubicles, reading silently, oblivious to their peers.

Many children enjoy reading books, of course, and no doubt some of the flights of fancy conveyed by reading have their escapist merits. But for a sizable percentage of the population, books are downright discriminatory. The reading craze of recent years cruelly taunts the 10 million Americans who suffer from dyslexia –– a condition didn't even exist as a condition until printed text came along to stigmatize its sufferers.

But perhaps the most dangerous property of these books is the fact that they follow a fixed linear path. You can't control their narratives in any fashion –– you simply sit back and have the story dictated to you. For those of us raised on interactive narratives, this property may seem astonishing. Why would anyone want to embark on an adventure utterly choreographed by another person? But today's generation embarks on such adventures millions of times a day. This risks instilling a general passivity in our children, making them feel as though they're powerless to change their circumstances. Reading is not an active, participatory process; it's a submissive one. The book readers of the younger generation are learning to 'follow the plot' instead of learning to lead."

Comments

[Peter G. Johnson]

Dear Mr. Johnson,

Your theories, as I understand them from the NY Times article and your web-site, are very interesting. However, while I believe every medium has intrinsic positive and negative qualities, I do disagree with you on the matter of importance of content. I would no more urge an impressionable child to read "Mein Kampf" with out the proper maturity and context than to watch "24" without the guidance proper maturity and context.

I am not promoting censorship in any form. I wholly disagree with this so call "moral values" rot that has recently gripped the politics of this country. Yet I would never allow a young child to listen to the George Carlin CD's I do for obvious reasons. Ultimately it is up to the parents to decide what their children should watch, but I hope we don't have only adult content for the children. I'd like to know what your views on "Sesame Street" are.

Philo Farnsworth hoped his invention would be used to educate the masses. Indeed, your theory is probably one he would have embraced. Nonetheless, I think he would agree that content of what we witness, fictional or real does play an important role in our psychological development. I would be wary of dismissing the role of content plays in the debate over "quality" television.

Your theories add a welcome prong to the debate over the media and its role in our society. I look forward to reading your book.

Sincerely,

Peter G. Johnson

[Geoff Ryan]

You're excerpt in the NY Times was interesting and well thought out but the biggest flaw with your case is that these shows you mentioned are not new and exciting formats - they are soap operas - obviously made for primetime viewers with a broader demographic in mind but still just soap operas in form.

On a personal note, I don't believe it makes people smarter as much as it just makes consistent viewing more important. The shows are smarter and more indepth but as viewers we aren't challenged anymore than navigating our own daily dramas.

Thanks for the article though and I do look forward to your book. While I may not fully agree with your ideas I do find your research intriguing.

~GEOFF

[Andrew]

Geoff, I think Steven specifically acknolwedges that shows like the Sopranos are structured like soap operas. The important point is that the innovation was adding serious subject matter to that narrative structure--more serious than who slept with whom on Guiding Light. The formal similarities are only one part of the argument.

Also, I hope readers interested in more about video games noticed the excellent article in the Education Life section of the Times today: "Much Fun, for Credit":
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/24/education/brenna24.html

It makes a good case for treating video game design and development as a sort of new liberal arts education.

[tomas]

i read a short summary concerning your book and i must say that i thought it seemed ridicolous. I am a media-student and i am still learning so I dont know enough to judge something by the cover of a book, but what I read over at http://www.boingboing.net/ made me think that maybe you are one of them, trying to convince people that tv isnt making you stupid but rather unifying and activating you (which of course, in any way isnt true) - anyway, I will place my first order from amazon.com (seeing you book was unavailable on any e-stores in sweden where I come from) and perhaps pick up some other stuff which just might suit me aswell.

cheers
all the best
/t

[Brian Carnell]

Geoff wrote,

"On a personal note, I don't believe it makes people smarter as much as it just makes consistent viewing more important. The shows are smarter and more indepth but as viewers we aren't challenged anymore than navigating our own daily dramas."

One thing I appreciate about television is that there is plenty of television that the plots and situations are far more three dimensional. 24 doesn't always offer an easy out to the situations it puts its characters in. Jack Bauer is clearly an anti-hero and he frequently does things that may or may not be ethical and may or may not be necessary.

Or look at the ambivalent veiw that a show like "The Shield" offers on the police procedural compared to a 1970s cop show.

So I do think a show like "24" is more demanding because its not a straightforward morality play where within the first 15 minutes you know who the good guy is, who the bad guy is, and how everything's going to be resolved in the final 10 minutes.

One of the defects of video games is that they have yet, for the most part, failed to capture anything like that. Most games are pretty much amoral -- shooting someone is simply another way of interacting with the environment. Either its a straightforward two dimensional ethics of Good Player vs. Bad Computer or there's no thought to it. (The best example I can think of that breaks that mould is the nerve stapling option in Alpha Centauri, but even videogames that try to implement moral dilemmas generally go the lame route of tying it to game performance, so morality becomes just another ruleset to be tested and exploited).

[Chow]

Reading books might be passé OK [at least reading 1 book at a time], but not reading online, where you can read many different things almost simoultaneously and also write, listen to music, etc.

One serious problem I see with video games and TV is that they kill your ability to visualize, think abstractly [since you are seeing the environment already], and this is a wonderful skill that differentiate us from animals and has brougth so many solutions to mankind.

[rochelle]

This is for Chow....

Do you have evidence for games and TV impairing the ability to visualize and think abstractly? Or is that just a hunch? We're a multi-media family--mom and 2 teen girls who are voracious consumers of tv, video games, music and print media of all sorts (including graphic novels), and I've not noticed any decrease in abstract or imaginative thinking.

As for the people (not just kids) who spend the bulk of their time in front of a screen watching images of some sort, at the exclusion of other input: what do you imagine folks like that did before tv/video games? I can't imagine they were reading or writing or sitting around thinking.

I guess I am bothered by one-size-fits all approaches to these issues. Our brains all work differently, and I think it does a great disservice to characterize whole groups of media or communication means as Very Good or Very Bad. As a librarian, I hear this argument frequently. "It's PRINT or nothing, baby!" There aren't many of us in the profession who you'll hear say that reading for the sake of reading, ain't all that. And when many librarians say "reading," they mean a paper book, not ebooks, not screen reading of any sort.

Steve--looking forward to your book. I'll make sure it's on our shelves at the library, if not already on order.

[Nick]

Just read the NYT article (via BoingBoing). This is going to sound really odd (or creepy for the PC), but we made a conscious decision that our son (2-1/2 now) would watch TV more than recommended by parenting experts (none).
My wife and I both grew up on TV, and we both recognize that we received many benefits from that (at the time) little window on the world. With modern satellite we receive an amount of intelligent programming that would have been unimaginable back in the 70's. We can already see surprising results - our son identifies things that we have not exposed him to directly, some rudimentary spanish, etc. The benefits will grow as he can understand even more types of programming. We do always watch with him, and comment on that which we think is stupid, illogical, and follow up with little tidbits of information as we watch.
Besides the TV programming, we get 60 channels of music which is unimaginable even at the height of radio. Now that he can use the mouse a bit we are starting to get him online as well to play simple games. I'm not going to say that my friends who limit their kids media intake are going to doom their kids to a type of learning disability but, oh ok, I will, their kids are doomed. This is not to say that reading isn't important as well, growing up my father passed an odd mutation onto me, the ability to read and watch TV at the same time. We have a thousand books at home, why not have hundreds of channels?

[Tikaro]

I look forward to reading your book. You may enjoy reading (if you haven't already), G. K. Chesterton's "A Defence of Penny Dreadfuls", in which Chesterton in 1901 defends this popular printed genre against the exact same kinds of criticisms that, today, are leveled against television. Chesterton's essay shows (at least to me) that the enemies of popular culture have always been there, claiming that it's "not good enough", and that the more things change, etc.
Anyhow, here's the link to the essay:
http://www.dur.ac.uk/martin.ward/gkc/books/penny-dreadfuls.html

[Steven Johnson]

Hey all, really interesting stuff, and too much to respond to in depth right now. A couple of points for the record:

1. I totally agree that most kids should have some sort of guide for "24" -- and probably anyone under 15 or so shouldn't be watching. It's an intense show, and I have problems personally with some of the content. (Mostly the torture.) But that doesn't mean you don't have to exercise your mind to watch it.

2. Following from #1: I think content is important. I just don't think it's the only thing we should be talking about. There are a thousand articles written every day about content. I'm trying to focus on something else that I think is just as important, but almost never discussed.

3. Nick's anecdote about his letting his kid watch TV was great, and very bold, and we're basically holding to the same policy with our boys, though I'm a little happier when they're using the computer...

4. Somehow I had never seen that Chesterton essay about the Penny Dreadfuls. Thank you!

sbj

[nick]

About computer useage - we live in Oregon and have a lot of "liberal" friends who rarely let their kids use the internet at all (and no TV, books only from the library, etc). The internet is the most profound human invention since (insert important invention here) and use of it is a primary skill that children have to learn.
Just as we'll educate our son about the techniques and analysis of TV watching, so we'll teach our son about the use of the internet with a strong emphasis on determining the relative truth of content on various web sites, as well as how to participate in group discussions (so overlooked in writing about the internet is the ability of an interest group (yahoogroups, usenet, etc) to raise, analyse and solve problems in a very short time via discussion groups)

My son is watching by the current episode of "Nature" as I type this, yet is simultaneously playing with his Brio trains. I couldn't be happier. Multitasking....

[Anthony]

As I mention in my blog entry that links to the Times article:

"It has always struck me as odd that people criticize television watching as mindless entertainment. Hardly mindless. Attentional and memory demands, abstraction, requirements imposed by presentation of diverse vantage points, fast pacing, and so on, all point to fairly active neurocognition. Indeed, in some of my rehabilitation patients, I often assign choosing and watching a favorite TV show as an adjunctive and supportive "at home" task."

Looking forward to reading the book to get a fuller sense of your broader themes.

[Anthony]

Michael Canfield:

Re your question-

Video games or game-like software have often been used in interventions with younger adults with traumatic brain injuries and are becoming possible modalities in aging populations (though typically with different themes). Reaction-time issues call for such games in the elderly to have slower sensori-motor timing, in order to take advantage of all the other cognitive dimensions.

-Anthony
BrainBlog at http://neuropsychological.blogspot.com

[denise]

Gosh, I would have loved to be one of the people who read an early manuscript of your book! I'm a huge fan. Loved the piece in NYT Mag -- my favorite part, since I could actually see you "performing" it, was "Unlocked! Unlocked!" -- and hope I get to argue with you about it and/or get the performance in person some time soon.

[dan]

You present interesting points but it is dangerous to speculate in such a manner.
Television IS incredibly dulling and addictive and has been shown in many scientific studies, not speculative thought experiments.
Much of the research is summarized nicely in this Sciam article->
http://www.simpletoremember.com/vitals/TV_Danger_SCIAM.htm
Complex plotlines may cause you to think a little more but they don't change the inherent passivity of the beast. The real reasons TV sucks you in are the same. The motion, the colors, the timing of cuts is very formulaic and tuned to our perception systems. The plotline is a very small tidbit on top.

[Jake]

Ajit AP:

I think the point of the thought experiment is not to denigrate books but rather to demonstrate that it's possible (easy, even) to portray any new medium as inferior and even harmful when compared to a traditional, established medium.

I'm sure Steven isn't seriously arguing that books are bad things in any way.

[Ryan Healy]

Steven,

Leaving alone for a minute your desire to portray positively the content of television (a hard enough task as it is) did you ever think about doing some research on the effects of the medium itself? The excerpt from your book which focuses on the content SCREAMS red herring. Pop culture isn't getting any more or less smart. Serial novels, the epitome of pop in the late 1800's, were far more sophisticated than anything currently on television.

I think this continued focus on the content of television instead of the effects of the medium itself is dangerous and irrelevant.

http://www.koyaanisqatsi.org/films/evidence.php

Thanks,
Ryan

[Jose]

Steven,

what do you think about the new study that concludes that modern technology depletes human cognitive abilities more rapidly than drugs.

the link here:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/04/22/email_destroys_iq/

jose

[Steven Johnson]

Two quick things:

Jake is right: the argument against books is parody, not my real feelings about books. It's imagining what some kind self-important Cultural Authority would say about the new fad of reading if they'd been raised on videogames. For the record, I love books, and obviously I make my living by writing them.

And Jose, I thought the study you refer to was very interesting, and probably correct, and I'll have more to say about it on the blog shortly. But it does *not* say that modern technology is lowering IQ; it says that a very specific form of digital multitasking briefly lowers IQ. IQ on average has been rising over the past fifty years, and seems to be accelerating over the past decade.

sbj

[A.R.Yngve]

I've worked in many media over the years -- videogames, comics, literature, the Web -- so I'm familliar with the typical prejudice against a New Medium.

For instance, when a critic wanted to scoff at my novel TERRA HEXA, he compared it to a videogame. (Ha, scoffed the critic haughtily, what can be more deplorable a comparison than with a *snark* videogame!)

Future book readers may WANT novels to be like videogames, because the cultural paradigm has shifted -- no, really.

I don't see the problem... :)

-A.R.Yngve
http://yngve.bravehost.com

[Ajit AP]

Playful ideas that many parents will love you for!!

My problem is in the quote "The book readers of the younger generation are learning to 'follow the plot' instead of learning to lead."

Let us overlook for a second that you began the discussion with the lead "let us suppose this scenario" that brought about an intriguing perspective.

How do we learn outside of our world, Thomas Hardy in Jude the Obscure, leads and you follow no matter how painful it is but it is through this following does one truly understand the social and relegious problems that have been overcome and continue to be overcome. It is in this follow, do we realize the objects that we are, thus more conscious of our selves and truly understanding our place in this world which in turn gives power through this knowledge.

It is in deep thought, achieved outside of social interaction, that we get in touch with ourselves. It is here, we make our break through's both personally and in our passions. Those children that play their games are not really "dumbing down" but not really challenging themselves either. The challenge to young people is to concentrate. However demanding a video game might be on one's attention, it is not challenging where it truly hurts and where the lessons are more than social skills or motor skills.

In following, we bring our emotions into play. In lead, we are discovering. Each certainly has its place. In following, we can possibly build. In leading, without the following, discoveries come and go but are wasted.

David Lynch, once attributed his days doing absolutely nothing, as a child, that brought about his wild imagination. There is a lot to be said about following and silence.

I have not read your book, so all these points could be mute points but...

[Michael Canfield]

I wonder if there would be a use for video games among the elderly. Fighting against Alzheimer's and possibly depression. The brain, I seem to remember reading (maybe, I forget so much these days) works like a muscle: use it or lose it. Anyone know of any research in this area?

[Mark Wise]

I'm surprised that Mr. Johnson made no mention of "Babylon 5". It shares all of the characteristics he lauds in other current dramas, including obsessive analysis on the web.

[Chow]

To rochelle, I don't have evidences it's just an idea, I feel quite bored watching TV and just believe it must be not enough challenge for my brain. Same applies to videogames [but I'm 41]. I don't get that feeling when I program, play the violin, write, read and do things with the computer.
A good test would be to ask outstanding minds [Einstein types] how they feel about watching TV, not the average coach potato.

[Christopher]

Hello Steven...I'm wondering if you considered in your book how your conclusions square with the Child Well-being Index (CWI)? It tracked the general well-being of kids in the US from 1975-2002. This nation and those years seem particularly relevant as data for the effect of pop-culture on kids so I thought I'd bring it to your attention. 1975 is taken as the baseline year and seven domains are considered: safety/behavior, community, material well-being, educational attainments,emotional/spiritual and health. Here's a link to the summary report: http://www.brookings.edu/comm/events/20040324index.pdf.

The overall conclusion is that kids are doing better, but not in the areas you mention in relation to gaming. That is, there has been an increase in a sense of place in the community, but a decrease in social relationships. It seems social networks are less strong than before. Also, educational attainments have remained the same. Of the seven domains three have improved, one stayed the same and three have declined. To me this indicates that the vast increase in information technology that has brought about online communities and gaming environments has had a neutral impact on intelligence and a decrease in areas that are important to developing into a fully functioning human being: emotional/spiritual, health and social. Of course, there has been an increase in the material well-being and the physical safety of children in this time period, but based on this report and my limited knowledge of the specifics of your book those are some thoughts that came to mind.