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While I Was Vacating...

I've just returned from a week-long escape to Martha's Vineyard, and have about fifteen things I want to post about, but for the time being, two fun Everything Bad media sightings from the past week.

First, a long and entertaining profile of yours truly in the Washington Post, featuring an extremely goofy picture of me contemplating an XBox controller. I love the opening riff:

There seem to be two Steven Johnsons. And at this particular moment, it's hard to believe they're the same guy.

There's Steven Johnson, Swell Dad, the one who sits across the table from you in his Brooklyn dining room and politely interrupts your conversation to commune with a way-cute toddler who's dashed in bearing bottled water and news from the outside world. "Hi, Rowan! Oh, thank you, that's very helpful. Was it hot outside, buddy?" he says.

Then there's Steven Johnson, Parents' Nightmare.

Second, you know you've hit some kind of weird zeitgeist critical mass when your book shows up in Doonesbury. (It's being spoofed, of course, but hey -- it's Doonesbury!)

The List, At Last

I'm happy to report that Everything Bad has -- finally -- hit a couple of national bestseller lists this week, coming in at #35 on the New York Times extended list, and #37 on the Booksense list. It's generally very difficult to sell books that talk about media and technology from a cultural perspective -- particularly books that focus on video games -- even when they manage to generate as much conversation and coverage as this one has. So today's a good day, although I feel a little bit like I personally sold every single copy of the book, given how many interviews I've done over the past six weeks.

This also means that I've now written back-to-back national bestsellers, which is a nice track record to have. But most of all, this means that I can stop checking my Amazon sales ranking every fifteen minutes, and go back to the completely sane frequency of checking once every half-hour. (Sales rank gets updated every hour, for those of you who don't follow this sort of thing.)

NewsHour

I really hate to do this to you all, but I'll be on the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer tonight, talking about social security refor--no, wait, I think this interview I'm talking about why pop culture is actually making us smarter. Surprise! We taped it quite a while ago, so I don't really remember how it went, but I seem to recall we had more time than your average TV interview. That may be good news or bad news, depending on how sick of me you are.

Behind The Comedy On The Daily Show

So last night I made my appearance on The Daily Show. For those of you who didn't catch it, the show airs again today at 10AM EST, 8PM, and 11:30PM. There's also a torrent file here if you want to view the segment in MPEG2 format.

I have to say I thoroughly enjoyed the experience, and in a funny way it seemed like a personal milestone for me. I spent a large stretch of my childhood obsessed with comedians, and the old Letterman Show (even the old, old, Letterman daytime show) was a formative part of my adolescent sense of self. I spent a few wayward years around that point in my life seriously thinking that I wanted to be a talk show host. (I have long since abandoned this idea.) So there was something pretty cool about sitting down on that couch and taking a sip from the obligatory coffee mug.

I'm most proud of something that you can barely see in the clip. When I first walked on stage, as I stepped up onto the main platform, the base unit of my wireless mic detached from my belt, and dropped down towards the floor, almost pulling the mic out of my lapel. A lesser guest might have panicked -- "Cut! Cut! My mic is broken!" -- but somehow I managed to swing the base unit back into my hand and quickly deposit it into my coat pocket while shaking hands with Jon. (I'll call him Jon because, you know, we're terribly good friends now.) I was pretty relaxed and confident going into the interview, but that little catch gave me an extra boost right as we started talking. Whatever doesn't kill you -- or at least whatever doesn't cut out your audio feed -- makes you stronger, I guess...

Doing an interview like that is an intense form of mental gymnastics. I've done my fair share of 5-minute TV interviews -- particularly for this book -- and so I'm familiar with the compressed, self-editing of television time. You can't let an answer go on for more than a few sentences, and in my case I have to repress my natural tendency to go meta on the question before answering it. But for every other TV interview I've done, the host is basically focusing on letting me get my message out; they ask the questions, but it's really my show. With Jon Stewart, on the other hand, there's a genuine interest in the material, but there's also a mandate to be funny, or at least a mandate for him to be funny. And so you're simultaneously trying to figure out on the fly how to compress your book's thesis into television scale, and at the same time, you want to keep the flow of the talk-show banter going. They warn you in advance not to try to deliver prepared jokes, and I can understand why -- the best points in the interview are inevitably the points where it seems like a genuine conversation between two people who happen to tell funny stories or make passing jokes as part of their dialogue.

At any rate, you can be the judge of how it all turned out. A few folks have asked what Jon said to me as we cut to commercial after the interview -- sadly, it was not my fantasy scenario: "That was the best interview I have ever conducted. When I retire, this seat is yours." Instead, he said something nice about wishing that we'd had more time to get into the book's argument and that he'd really enjoyed reading it. He seemed, for what it's worth, like a genuinely nice guy, very much like the persona he has on the show.

It's My Birthday, But More Importantly...

Yes, it's true. I turned 37 today, and of course I'm celebrating by coming down with the first cold I've had since 2004. But my health issues will not prevent me from realizing my life-long dream (okay, two-years-long dream) of being a guest on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart tomorrow night (Tuesday June 7.) We're taping in the late afternoon, and I gather the first airing will be 11 PM tomorrow, and then it will run on and off through the day Wednesday. It should be a fun -- and hopefully funny -- experience, and I'll definitely post here about it when I get back.

The Good News, For A Change

In the comment threads here Christopher Cloos made a passing remark that jumped out at me: "Steven has been barraged by an onslaught of critiques."

It occurred to me that reading the blog over the past month would give you a very skewed idea of the book's reception, for two primary reasons. First, I generally avoid linking to or quoting the positive reviews, because, well, it's enough of a vanity site as it is. And second, I tend to respond to the criticisms -- even if they're lodged within reviews that are otherwise positive -- because there's more to say about the criticisms, and presumably responding to the criticisms make for more interesting reading than me just savoring the nice write-ups. (For instance, I don't think I've even mentioned Walter Kirn's entertaining and very flattering piece from the Times Book Review a few weeks ago.)

And so I can imagine it might seem as though the book is getting more than its fair share of negative reviews. But, in fact, the response has been overwhelmingly positive -- much more positive, in fact, than I imagined it would be, given the premise of the book. I figured if we were lucky, we'd end up 60-40 positive-negative. In fact, it has been more like 90-10.

So for those of you who are interested in following this sort of thing, here are some links to some of the higher-profile positive reviews the book has received since it came out:

Financial Times review

San Fran Chronicle Review

Super interesting McLuhanite review from the Toronto Star

London Times Review

Scotsman review

Subscriber-only review from The Economist.

Segment on ABC World News Tonight that aired last week on the book and videogames

Fascinating Guardian article about the use of games in education

San Francisco Chronicle op-ed about the book and role of play

We've also been the London TimeOut Book Of The Week, and an editor's pick in the NY Times, The Boston Globe, and San Jose Mercury-News. And then of course, there are the positive reviews I've already linked to on the site: Gladwell in the New Yorker, The National Review, Time, The Boston Globe, Salon, etc.

Okay, I've got that out of my system. Now we can return to the regularly scheduled program of (mostly) quoting from the criticisms.

Hard Evidence

Christopher Ball writes in to the comments area here with this critique, some variations of which have appeared in other responses to Everything Bad:

I think the problem is that the subtitle of your book -- how can you demonstrate that all of this is making us smarter?... You have a similar problem with Maclom Gladwell's _Blink_ -- where is the data to support the claims that you as an author are making, not the ancedotes from studies with more limited claims?

I think when you look at comparable books in the past that have made equivalent -- though diametrically opposed -- statements about the culture and its impact on our intelligence, you'll find that Everything Bad is much more concerned with empirical evidence than its predecessors. In a way, you can think of the book is a mirror-image version of influential books like The Closing Of The American Mind and Amusing Ourselves To Death -- both of which made bold claims about the impact of culture on the American mind in their title. If you go back and look at those books, they offer no evidence whatsoever that people are literally being dumbed-down; they simply offer a survey of the culture at large, compare it to past cultural moments, and conclude that the trend is a negative one, and thus likely to have negative effects on our minds.

Now, I happen to think this is a perfectly valid way to write -- cultural critics have a role to play, and it's not the exact same role that a social scientist should be expected to play. And in fact, had I written Everything Bad in my twenties, I would have taken the exact same approach: simply analyzing the cultural forms on their own terms, and making conclusions based on those observations. (In other words: the popular forms are getting more complicated, thus our brains must be adapting to that newfound complexity in some important way.)

But in fact, I didn't want the book to exist solely on the cultural level. So I went out of my way to include other evidence and explanatory models to back up my thesis. I explained how the popular forms appear to be sharpening precisely the kinds of skills that are measured by IQ tests, and then showed that IQ scores are rising. I looked at the Harvard study of gamers in the business population to demonstrate that those skills have real-world applicability, and pointed to the Rochester visual study to show that even very tight-focus studies show clear transfer of skills from gameplay to real-world application. In the notes, I deconstruct the numbers behind the illusion of declining SAT scores, and explain why test scores have been actually rising since the nadir of seventies television. And I brought in evidence from the brain sciences to explain why this kind of learning should be happening in the first place -- the dopamine section, and the section on the "regime of competence".

Is it a slam-dunk case, based purely on the lab evidence? Of course not. It's an opening volley. But it's much more rigorous -- at least where hard evidence is concerned -- than most of the sweeping declarations about the popular mind than we've debated in the past.