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Is Satire Also The Best Form Of Flattery?

Perhaps the clearest sign that Everything Bad has reached some kind of bizarre saturation point is the fact that major newspapers are now publishing parodies of the book and its argument. (File this under: be careful what you wish for.) It's tempting to be thin-skinned about these sorts of things, but they really have been very funny, and of course the book in question lends itself naturally to satire.

A while back Jason Kottke included Everything Bad in his hilarious "How To Order Food In A Restaurant":

Order anything made with lots of butter, sugar, etc. Avoid salad or anything organic. A meal of all desserts may be appropriate. Or see if you can get the chef to make you a special dish like foie gras and bacon covered with butterscotch and hot fudge. Ideally, you will have brought a Super Sized McDonald's Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese Meal into the restaurant with you. Smoke and drink liberally.

This week The Guardian's "editor's page" included a "digested" version of the book:

This book is an old-fashioned work of persuasion that aims to convince you of one thing: that I am one of the most influential social commentators of the 21st century. To this end I have decided to take the generally accepted premise that modern culture is dumbing down and argue the opposite, as this will guarantee me a lot of attention.
Take video games. The common view is that the people who play them are witless, atavistic sociopaths. Nothing could be further from the truth. Modern games have a free-form structure that constantly challenges the player to interact with the environment and make complex decisions.
By contrast, books deliver a linear narrative that rarely forces the reader to think. What book can teach you how to cut someone up with a chainsaw, hide their body in a dumpster and evade capture by crawling through a ventilation duct?

Finally, my favorite: a column written by the Boston Globe's Alex Beam, in which he imagines a conversation with his 12-year-old son about the book. I believe you now have to pay to read the article in the Globe archives, but basically, the joke is that Beam is trying to get his son to stop playing "Warcraft III" and his son keeps countering with quotes from Everything Bad. I particularly loved this bit:

''If not 'The Sopranos,' maybe we could watch reality TV, like 'Joe Millionaire.' Mr. Johnson says
those shows are full of 'collateral learning.' Or I could watch my 10,000th consecutive
'Simpsons' rerun. Johnson thinks reruns 'are responsible for making the culture smarter.' "

''They're not making you any smarter! You watch reruns and junk DVDs over and over again! It's
so annoying!"

''You're so out of it. Movies today are worth watching over and over. Remember 'Finding
Nemo'?"

''That idiotic cartoon we saw on the plane?"

''The very one. Johnson writes that 'you can watch Nemo dozens of times and still detect new
information with each viewing, precisely because the narrative floats so many distinct story arcs
at the same time.' "

''He has little kids. Sleep deprivation has affected his judgment."

''Did you read The New Yorker review of his book, in which Malcolm Gladwell wrote that 'at the
elementary-school level, homework seems to be of marginal or no academic value'?"

''I asked Johnson about that. He said that was Gladwell talking. Johnson turns out to be very
pro-homework."

''Really? You talked to Johnson? Does he have the Creep Jacking cheat codes?"

Reviewing The Reviewers: Part 37

I'm writing this from the very last leg of my tour, which turns out to be a small seminar with ten Italian grad students on the isle of Capri, of all places. (I'm literally gazing out over the bay of Naples as I type.) So for all of you who pitied my exhausting tour schedule, you can hold off on the pity for now. For the first time in a month, I'm actually feeling genuinely relaxed.

While waiting for my flight from Heathrow I managed to catch John Derbyshire's essay/review of Everything Bad from The National Review. His piece turns out to be one of my favorite responses thus far, partially because it comes from someone I would have expected to be less sympathetic to the book's argument, and partially because he himself thought he was less sympathetic until he actually sat down to read the book.

If Johnson is right –– as I suspect he is –– our kids, under the stimulating pressure of ever shorter technology cycles, are going to go steaming past us in cognitive abilities, leaving us choking on their dust. Teenagers have, of course, always regarded their parents' painfully accumulated lifetime's wisdom as being irrelevant, our cherished beliefs antiquated, our fondest memories as remote as the Bronze Age. Now this contempt must be getting deeper, and it must be setting in at an earlier age.

A little less pleasant to read was Janet Maslin's review in the Times yesterday. Before we get to the substance of her critique, I should mention a strange pattern that seems to be developing with the Times daily reviewers. When my first book, Interface Culture, came out, it was ignored by the reviewers; a few years later when Emergence arrived, Michiko Kakutani gave it a mixed review, and said in passing that it wasn't nearly as good as my previous book. Then the daily Times reviewers chose not to review Mind Wide Open; and now Maslin gives Everything Bad a decidedly mixed review, and says in passing that it isn't nearly as good as my previous book.

Memo to Times book critics: if you're only going to review every other book -- which is fine, I'm honored to be reviewed at all -- could you perhaps choose to review the ones you actually like?

Now here's the part that I find strange in Maslin's critique:

The reader rattles around within the book's narrow universe and repeatedly bumps into the same thing: reiterations of Mr. Johnson's one big idea. Yes, X (fill in the name of a video game, reality television show or intricately plotted series like "24") may appear to be (pick one: mindless, stupid or violent). But X actually inculcates important survival skills. X shows how to test ideas, figure out which ones work and grasp the full sequence of steps that must be taken to achieve a certain goal. X makes you mentally alert, even if you appear to be slack-jawed and glassy-eyed. X makes you smarter.

Now, it true that I do have a number of analyses that attempt to show that X work of pop culture is actually more challenging than it's conventionally believed to be. The reason I did that is because the premise of pop culture being more challenging than it's conventionally believed to be is, um, THE WHOLE ARGUMENT OF THE BOOK. You could argue, I suppose, that there's nothing controversial about the thesis, and thus we don't need my various close readings to prove it, but I think it's pretty clear -- if you do a Google search on the title and sift through the insane volume of responses over the past few weeks -- that the complexity of pop culture was hardly a given before the book came out.

So if pop culture's complexity was not a given, then isn't it reasonable to grant me some room to make the case? Besides, I only spend about half the book actually walking through the examples -- the length of two longish New Yorker essays. Would Maslin have been happier if I had just done one close reading of TV show, and left it at that? I was actually worried that people would criticize the book for not being comprehensive enough, but I wanted it to be a quick read and so I tried to limit the examples to the major genres.

I do think she has a point in her skepticism about the reality TV section. This is one of the things that has been the most difficult about the interviews on the tour: because reality TV is so controversial, and because some of the publicity materials for the book talk up this angle, I've had more than my fair share of interviews that start by introducing me as the guy who thinks "Extreme Makeover" boosts your IQ.

The responsibility for this ultimately rests on my shoulders. If you look at the reality TV section, my argument involves three points: first, most reality TV is pretty mediocre. Second, since I'm talking about a trend in the culture, the question is: how does it stack up against the mediocre programming of the late seventies. That's where I say that I'd take "Survivor" any day over "The Price Is Right" or "Fantasy Island." That's not to imply by any means that "Survivor" is improving your mind, just to say that the quality of the TV programming is improving over time.

Looking back on it, I probably would have been better off if I'd just left it at that. But I felt -- and continue to feel -- that most critics don't get what makes reality programming so interesting to people, and indeed what makes it more interesting than "Fantasy Island." And so I wrote a few pages about the emotional intelligence that we use as viewers when we engage in these shows -- tracking the shifting psychological gameplay of the participants, and so on.

Now, if you go back and read the section carefully, I think it's still pretty clear that I think reality TV is not terribly nourishing, compared to the other examples I give. But I do think I could have flagged my misgivings a little more clearly. When you write a book about pop culture making us smarter and include a defense of reality programming, you have to assume that people will put the two together, and hear the message as: reality programming makes us smart!

A Few Semi-Random Items

A few odds and ends. First, I've been receiving a lot of requests for speaking gigs, which is great, but apparently the links in the sidebar (always chronically out of date, I know) haven't been working for my lecture agent. So if you'd like to arrange to have me come give some kind of talk, please drop Flip Porter a line at APB Speakers. His address is fporter@apbspeakers.com.

Secondly, those of you in the London area have two opportunities to come out and hear me talk: some sort of debate on popular culture tonight (Monday) at BAFTA, and a talk tomorrow connecting the new book with some of the ideas in Emergence at the wonderful Demos. Both should be a lot of fun.

Americans, apparently I'm going to be on Morning Edition on NPR any second now, so quick -- turn on your radio!

Reviewing The Reviewers: Will It Never Cease?

The Everything Bad world tour has now taken me to London, where I'll be running around like mad for the next four days or so. I'm now thinking of this whole experience as a kind of bizarre endurance test: can you fly across the ocean, arrive at your hotel at 11 PM, get five hours of jet-lagged sleep, and then go on national TV in a foreign country at 8 AM the next morning? (That was my Friday.)

Fortunately, I have about 36 hours off this weekend, and I'm going to enjoy every second of it. And part of that enjoyment is, of course, posting to the blog! There's a huge backlog of responses to the book that I've been wanting to write about here. One of the exciting things right now is that the blogosphere is finally getting a chance to read the book itself, and not just the Times excerpt, so the blog reviews have started rolling in, and predictably enough they've been fascinating and idiosyncratic.

First, though, a general response to the feedback in the UK. So far the reviews and comments have been very positive over here, but one of things I think should be said is that the Sleeper Curve story doesn't quite apply here where television is concerned, because the Brits don't have the same tradition of awful seventies programming that we had in the States. Without seeming too knee-jerk libertarian about it (see my politics post from last week) I suppose one way of describing the Sleeper Curve is that it's the story of how private sector mass media got more challenging and intelligent; state-run networks, like the BBC, have a much longer history of challenging programming. But of course the games and interactive media story of the Sleeper Curve applies equally well to the UK.

Now to the blogs -- I really enjoyed the comments from the always interesting Steve Shaviro and Mike Barthel of Clap Clap (which I had not seen before.) Both suggest that I've left something out in my definition of what "smarter" culture really means: Steve sees a lack of focus on emotional IQ, and Mike is troubled by the focus on cognitive benefits, at the expense of a broader aesthetic theory that can explain why we spend so much time immersed in the pop culture.

My response to both those points is to say that, first, they're both worthwhile topics for exploration, and indeed I've tried to wrestle with them in other contexts (a piece I did on Antonio Damasio and emotions for Discover, shortly after Mind Wide Open; and the aesthetics of interactivity that I developed in my first book, Interface Culture and the "Control Artist" chapter of Emergence.) But Everything Bad wasn't designed to be a comprehensive theory of popular culture, and so there are many important facets that I've left out. It's a very tactical book, designed to drive one point home: the increase in the "fluid intelligence" required to make sense of your average work of pop culture. There are many other interesting developments in the popular culture that are not covered in the book, and perhaps some day I'll write a longer account that tries to take in the entire system. But that's not what I wanted to do with this book: I wanted this one to take a genuinely complex -- and in some ways academic -- analysis and wrap it in a short polemic with a catchy title that would spark conversation and engagement.

(Speaking of the title, a number of people have assumed that my publisher forced the title on me to sell more books, but I assure you it was my idea all along. Having published a book called Interface Culture, I've paid my dues where dull and abstract titles are concerned.)

One final comment on the Flynn Effect and its role in the Sleeper Curve theory. I talked about rising IQs for two reasons: there's an ambitious, but still unproven, argument, and a less ambitious, but undeniable, one. I do believe that the increased complexity of today's media has had a positive effect on IQ scores, for the reasons outlined in the book. But that is merely an hypothesis, albeit one that many smart people who have looked at this question find plausible. But I invoked the Flynn Effect for another reason, which was to buttress my argument against the objection that I heard from a number of people when I first started writing the book: if the popular culture is making us smarter, how come everyone has gotten so stupid? There is debate about the causes behind the Flynn Effect, but there is no real debate about the phenomenon itself: when you look at precisely the kinds of intelligence that I'm talking about in the book -- abstract reasoning, pattern recognition, problem-solving, etc -- people are getting sharper over time, and not the opposite. So you can argue with my claim for a causal link between pop culture and rising IQ, but you can't dismiss the Sleeper Curve hypothesis out of hand by simply invoking how stupid everyone has become.

What My Life Is Like Right Now

As I mentioned before, I'm not going to use the blog to point to or preview all the media coverage for Everything Bad; I'll give you some warnings for the bookstore appearances (like Wednesday night at the Harvard Bookstore at 6:30) and interesting media as it happens, and of course respond to reviews and other comments when I have the time. But I wanted to just give you all a snapshot of what this tour is like. Keep in mind that 90% of the time the most pressing thing on my workday schedule is popping downstairs to have lunch with my wife and kids -- the rest is beautifully unstructured. But then a book comes out and my average day looks like this:

Last Thursday night, I fly into my hotel from San Francisco after my reading in Berkeley, arriving at the hotel in Seattle at 1:30 AM. Catch about five hours of sleep, and then wake up at around 7, have breakfast, and deal with some of the email that's gone unanswered over the past 24 hours. Then I'm off, and this is what the day looks like.

The "literary escort" picks me up at around 8:20 and we drive to a local television station; I tape two back to back television interviews for different shows.

We leave there and start the drive out to Microsoft, during which time I do an interview via cell phone with a national newspaper.

Then I do an hour-long talk at Microsoft, and sign some books.

Immediately afterwards, I get back in the car to drive back to downtown Seattle, and do an interview with a local New York paper on the cell as we drive.

The escort takes me to the DDB advertising agency, where I give another hour-long talk to a mix of agency people and some of their clients.

Then I race back to the hotel, where I do a phone interview with a major Florida newspaper. I rest for twenty minutes.

At 3 PM, the escort picks me up and takes me to the local NPR station, where I tape a twenty-minute interview there; the second that ends, we jump into the car, and head to a big AM station in Seattle, where I do a live interview with calls for a half hour.

By 5 PM I'm back at the hotel, and start an hour-long interview with a national magazine, that I literally have to interrupt to order room service halfway through, because otherwise I'm going to pass out. Then I have fifteen minutes to eat, before the escort picks me up and takes me to the University Of Washington, where I give yet another hour-long speech. I'm back at the hotel right around 9.

The final tally in about twelve hours of work: two television interviews, two radio interviews, four print interviews, and three speeches. The bottle of Cabernet waiting for me at the hotel has never tasted so good.

The Politics of Everything Bad

I promised a response to Steven Zeitchik's review that ran in the Chicago Trib this week. Here's the passage that I wanted to address:

Meanwhile, the pro-capitalist current that runs underneath his argument--for instance, that booming DVD sales encourage executives to create complexity--might make even Adam Smith blush. Can the free market give us not only a better quality of life but a purer soul?

This is an entirely fair objection to the book, and in fact, I contemplated putting in a few paragraphs talking about this issue, but ultimately decided against it -- there are only so many objections you can anticipate in the argument; if you have too high a ratio of anticipated objections to actual arguing, the book starts to sound defensive. In my original scheme, I was going to break all the objections off into an Appendix called "frequently voiced objections" with my rebuttals included, and one of them was: "Aren't you just a shameless apologist for capitalism and free markets? I thought you were supposed to be some kind of progressive!" So Steven's review makes me think I should have addressed this point somewhere in the text.

Here's my actual feeling about this question: I do not, in fact, believe that unfettered capitalism leads inevitably to smarter culture (this is presumably what would make Adam Smith blush.) I think capitalism has in general had a spotty record when it comes to sharpening the minds of the people living within it: most of the success stories have involved significant, if not indispensable, contributions from the public sector. What I am generally optimistic about is 1) the power of truly interactive technologies to sharpen minds, and 2) the innate drives in the human brain to seek out mental challenge when given the opportunity.

As my first two books made clear, I am much more of a technological determinist than an economic determinist. So the question for me isn't: what is capitalism doing to our minds? Rather, the question is: what is the current reigning technological paradigm -- combined with both market and public-sector forces -- doing to our minds? The book makes it pretty clear that I think the combination of free market capitalism and the mass media communication technologies of the mid-to-late twentieth century led to simpler, less demanding popular culture. The same could certainly be said of industrial technologies and 19th-century capitalism: factory labor was no doubt a mind-deadening experience. But I do think we are living through a period where the combination of digital-age network technologies, public sector investment (the creation of the internet itself) and market-driven incentives (the most repeatable programming idea from the book) have come together to create an upward trend in the complexity of the culture. But that's not simply cheerleading for free markets, even if it is a kind of cheerleading.

Gladwell On Everything Bad

Most of us who wanted to be writers from an early age probably had some point where they fantasized about getting a long, glowing review in The New Yorker. And it's especially nice to have one written by Malcolm Gladwell, whose writing and ideas have influenced me in a million ways, small and large, over the past ten years. So today's a fun day for me.

Also a very interesting review over the weekend in the Chicago Trib -- I have more to say about both of these, but probably won't get to them until the flight to LA tomorrow morning. In the meantime -- DC readers, drop what you're doing and head to the Georgetown Barnes And Noble where I will performing tonight. (I promise no reading.)

My Half-Baked McLuhan Impression

I'm not one to look the gift horse of a Wall Street Journal review in the mouth -- the writeup we got yesterday (sadly not available online) gave the book great placement, and seemed persuaded of some of my arguments. But, well, it's my blog, and so I'd like to just peer briefly into the horse's mouth, if you don't mind.

It's just a tiny, tiny bit frustrating when you go out of your way to present some contrasting arguments in your book, to make sure your readers realize that you're being fair -- and then a reviewer comes along and makes those exact same arguments as a criticism of the book, without acknowledging that he's paraphrasing your original point. You be the judge -- here's John Leo, in yesterday's Journal:

[Mr Johnson] does not offer the full-blown McLuhan argument: that media determine how we think and feel and that the gain of a new medium entails the cost of losing the old... The world of print, McLuhan though, produced privacy, individualism, critical analysis and linear thinking. As print recedes, the loss of such qualities will become more obvious....

Here's what I say in the closing pages of Everything Bad:

Now for the bad news... It is true that a specific, historically crucial kind of reading has grown less common in this society: sitting down with a three-hundred page book and following its argument or narrative without a great deal of distraction. We deal with text now in shorter bursts, following links across the web, or sifting through a dozen email messages. The breadth of information is wider in this world, and it is far more participatory. But there are certain types of experiences that cannot be readily conveyed in this more connective, abbreviated form. Complicated, sequential works of persuasion, where each premise builds on the previous one, and where an idea can take an entire chapter to develop, are not well-suited to life on the computer screen. (Much less life on “The O'Reilly Factor.”) I can't imagine getting along without email, and I derive great intellectual nourishment from posting to my weblog, but I would never attempt to convey the argument of this book in either of those forms... You can convey attitudes and connections in the online world with ease; you can brainstorm with twenty strangers in a way that would have been unthinkable just ten years ago. But it is harder to transmit a fully-fledged worldview. When you visit someone's weblog, you get a wonderful –– and sometimes wonderfully intimate –– sense of their voice. But when you immerse yourself in a book, you get a different sort of experience: you enter the author's mind, and peer out at the world through their eyes.

Now, it would be entirely fair to say that I don't place enough emphasis on the loss created by the shift away from print culture, but to say that I don't make that argument at all is simply untrue.

But you know, kids these days with their ADD, maybe he got distracted by something when he was reading that section...

Tune In Or Show Up

Last minute reminder to all of New York City: Apple Store. Tonight. 7:30. Me.

Also, I believe I will be on the Today Show tomorrow morning around 7:45 AM, EST for all you early-weekend-morning risers out there.

Everything Bad -- Live And In Person

As promised, I wanted to let you all know the dates for the various talks I'll be doing over the next two weeks or so. These should all be a lot of fun -- it's such a incendiary topic -- and thus not like your average dreary bookstore reading. So I hope some of you can come out and say hi -- and perhaps we'll all be able to go out afterwards to some local saloon and have a few drinks.

For you New Yorkers, I'm launching the tour with a special appearance at the Apple Store Soho on Friday night at 7:30. I'm going to do a little AV talk with some entertaining movies and visuals, so please come out if you can. (And afterwards, my friend Annie Keating is playing a show nearby at Arlene's Grocery, so we can retire there and listen to Annie's great music.)

The full schedule looks like this:

New York City Friday, May 6 Apple Store/Soho, 7:30 PM

Washington, DC Monday, May 9 Barnes & Noble/Georgetown, 7:30 PM

Los Angeles Tuesday, May 10 Vroman's Bookstore, 7 PM

San Francisco Wednesday, May 11 Books Inc./Mountain View, 7:30 PM

San Francisco Thursday, May 12 Cody's/Telegraph, 7:30 PM

Seattle Friday, May 13 Univ. of Washington/Kane Hall, 7:30 PM

Boston Wednesday, May 18 Harvard Bookstore, 6:30 PM

There's an international leg after that including appearances in London, Bristol, and Naples, but I'll put those details on blog when we get closer to that point. I'll also be updating the blog with select of the media appearances, but I promise not to overload you with that stuff.

See you on the road, I hope!