Customer Reviews

Everything Bad is Good for You

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Johnson highlights the ways in which some pop-culture is in fact more intellectually demanding than that of the past. He points to TV programs such as Hill Street Blues, The Sopranos, Seinfeld, and The Simpsons, with their continuous stories, multiple plot threads, and their references to other pop-culture. He also wrote a great deal highlighting the depth and intricacy of many computer games.

I could quibble on a few points. I think he gives cinema a little too much credit, basing his argument there primarily on a few intelligent films whose box office success ranged from weak to moderate. Strangely absent from Johnson's discussion is popular music, with no disclaimer nor any word of explanation for this. Since music is obviously a vast part of the pop culture landscape, its exclusion scores as a major omission.

But these caveats aside, I found that on the whole Johnson presented a very convincing case that a significant part of pop culture is in fact getting smarter. But regarding his premise that people are getting smarter as a result, that's where he got it very wrong.

For direct corroboration, the only hard statistic Johnson cites is the fact that IQ scores have been rising about 3 points per decade. By his own admission, they have been rising steadily at that rate for the last 70 years or so. Yet he perceives the smartening of pop culture as having started in 1981 (with the premiere of Hill Street Blues). So it seems a bit tenuous to claim the two phenomena are related.

Furthermore, IQ scores only measure a narrow range of intellectual abilities. What they measure is a rather mechanical, almost mathematical, sort of logical ability. They say very little about the more grey and nonlinear intelligence needed to comprehend, for example, literature or political science or comparative religion.

Aside from IQ score data, Johnson builds his case on anecdotal evidence, which in my view is easily refutable by other anecdotal evidence. Johnson presumes that since young people are the ones who soak up the most current pop culture, much can be gleaned from observing them.

That's a sensible rationale, so let's use it. Go into a fast food restaurant where young people work. See how many of them can make the correct change when the computerized cash register fails to work. Count how many teens you can find that can explain anything at length without stammering and peppering their sentences with like's and you-know's. And how long can a typical teen even watch TV without channel surfing?

Johnson acknowledges the studies that expose how embarrassingly little knowledge American students have of, for example, historical literacy. He claims that content is only secondarily important, that young people's skill at video games, computers, and general multi-tasking are skills that easily transfer to other sorts of tasks.

To some extent I would agree. But when significant percentages of young people can't even place the Civil War in the correct century, nor can they give a general description of what the Bill of Rights says, something fundamental and deep is lost. It's a bit simplistic to think that computer game agility is a skill that easily "transfers over" into a grasp of the subtleties of the philosophy of government. There are some intellectual capacities that can only be gained by studying certain things.

He also ignores the fact that these American young people seem to exhibit these skills primarily when something is lighting up, moving, and making noises. What about being able to study and learn when you don't know that there will be a definite reward, as there always is with a computer game? It's quite telling how rarely young people are willing to sit for an extended period of time in a quiet room with only paper and books and no electronic media.

The fact is, students in Russia and some European countries have consistently outscored US students on all sorts of scholastic tests. And they watch TV and play computer games less in those countries.

Johnson mentioned how every household today has a running joke about how the 9-year-old is the only one in the family who can set the VCR clock or figure out how to work the remote. True enough. But that could be for the same reason that any adult found it easier to learn music or a foreign language when they were children. That was always been true long before there was an electronic pop culture. Some skills by their nature are simply easier to learn the younger you start.

Though Johnson misses the point much of the time, I give him credit for attempting to answer a number of devil's advocate counter-arguments. He also writes in a plainspoken and engrossing style. Along the way in making his case, he gives some very readable exposition about other factual matters, such as IQ scores and the Flynn effect. However much or however little you'll agree with him, it's a captivating and enjoyable read.

Very good book, written from the perspective of a teenaged gamer made good.

Johnson played games as a kid, baseball strategy games, as well as Dungeons and Dragons, and one can detect a certain bias in his outlook. However, his statistical references and footnotes make this book a scholarly look at popular culture - in particular movies, TV and videogames - and is a nice refutation of the "our culture is going into the toilet" crowd.

Johnson argues - to me, convincingly - that even though modern mass market entertainment may appear "dumbed down", it really isn't, and that at a basic physical level, our brains are being made to work harder, get more exercise if you will, and develop higher cognitive functions as a result.

A very complex book written in easy to read language with convincing data to back up the arguments - disguised in a very palatable dialogue that doesn't seem like science at all. He even takes Marshall McLuhan to task on at least one of his conclusions - very daring, and in this case, pays off.

Johnson does miss out on one or two things - the ascendance of message boards is glossed over, or perhaps incorporated into "Internet" "email" and "IMs" in the discussion of why males watch about 1/5 as much TV as they did as little as five years ago.

As a fellow who grew up playing Advanced Squad Leader (arguably a set of rules even more dense than AD&D), I could relate to his argument that kids will learn horribly complex procedures in the name of fun (as he did with his baseball games and D&D sets) and may very well be better for it.

Overall, even if one disagrees with Johnson's arguments or conclusions, the book is fun to read; brings back memories for those who grew up in the 70s and 80s, presents logical arguments, well constructed, easy to understand, and supported by corroborating evidence - including scientific testimony about how the physical (hi Shannon) human brain works. Would love to read a rebuttal, though Johnson has personally sold me over hook, line and sinker. If nothing else, a comforting book amidst doom and gloom prophesies about the fate of our intellect in the hands of TV producers. Well done, Mr. Johnson.

Steven Johnson's newest book, "Everything Bad Is Good For You" makes the controversial claim that popular culture engages us in a kind of mental calisthenics, resulting in the drastic changes in IQ distribution seen in the last 50 years. He describes beneficial effects of changes in popular culture - changes that have often been decried as hallmarks of societal demise - and shows how these new forms of media exploit our natural reward circuitry. Echoing Marshall McLuhan, Johnson says it's not so much the content (or 'message') of cultural media like Grand Theft Auto and The Sopranos, but the multi-threaded, interactive style of delivery (the 'medium') that engages us in a cognitive workout, and ultimately results in the drastic IQ increases of post-World War II America.

Johnson begins his book with a vitriolic quote from George Will: "Ours is an age besotted with graphic entertainments. And in an increasingly infantilized society, whose moral philosophy is reducible to a celebration of 'choice,' adults are decreasingly distinguishable from children in their absorption in entertainments and the kinds of entertainments they are absorbed in - video games, computer games, hand-held games, movies on their computers and so on. This is progress: more sophisticated delivery of stupidity." This quote characterizes the dominant perspective on popular culture. But contrary to intuition, Johnson argues, today's most popular entertainment is enormously complex according to several different metrics, such as number of concurrent plot lines, the interdependence or 'nesting' of those plot lines, the Kolmogorov complexity of the networks relating the characters, and the kind of thinking required to make sense of all this complexity. And what's more, popular media has been trending towards increased complexity for the past half-century.

The economics driving these developments relate to a shift from "least objectionable" programming into "most repeatable" programming, rewarding those games/movies/narratives that embrace ambiguity, those that require the entertained to take a more active and exploratory role in comprehension, and those that reward the inquisitively entertained with yet more ambiguity to resolve upon the next viewing. This neuroeconomic "device" is perfectly designed to hijack the pleasure system by establishing an expectation of reward. It is precisely this type of cognition which has been shown to modulate dopamine levels in the nucleus accumbens, providing the fix craved by pack-a-day smokers, ice-cream fanatics, and gambling addicts alike.

And while the violence illustrated in games like Grand Theft Auto may seem to provide the cognitive nutrition equivalent to gambling, Johnson emphasizes (to use McLuhan's phrase) that the "medium is the message." It is not the content so much as the method of delivery that determines its most important effects: that of rewarding critical thinking and emphasizing interactivity, whether purely cognitive (as in complex narratives) or integrating motor skills as well (as in games). Whatever the detrimental effects of prime-time depravity might be, the positive effect of this new interactive media trend takes the form of "the Sleeper Curve": a 3-point increase in average IQ per year for each of the past 100 years. To put this change in perspective, consider this: a person placing in the 90th percentile of IQ in 1920 would place in the bottom third of a IQ test in 2000.

"Everything Bad Is Good For You" is an incredibly provocative piece of cultural criticism, and while light on experimental evidence for causal relationships between IQ increases and changes in popular culture, it more than makes up for that shortcoming by illuminating ways in which this evidence might be attained. The book's best moments call to mind the optimism of the early 90s for engineering an interactive techno-topia, but these moments are thankfully tempered with a rigorously historical perspective and a firm grounding in relevant neuroscience. The book should be required reading for anyone with even a passing interest in communication theory, and is highly recommended for those with an interest in integrating neuroscientific principles with entertainment and education.

According to the Flynn Effect IQ scores have been on the rise since the end of World War II and nobody has any idea why. This trend was long overlooked because every few years the people who make the tests standardize them so that the average score is 100; this standardization has been gradually making the test harder and harder for years. Many find this national increase in intelligence baffling. With kid's growing fatter every year vegging out in front of the TV watching reality shows and playing video games it's hard to imagine that anyone is getting smarter. Steven Johnson, in his new book, makes a strong argument that it is because of our dedication to multimedia, not in spite of it, that we are getting more intelligent.

As is bound to happen, people have been overly skeptical of this theory; they cling to the outdated belief that reading holds a higher level of cognitive importance than any other form of entertainment. Leading child care experts like Dr. Spock urge parents to keep their children away from mind-numbing activities like television and video games and steer them towards recreational reading. Most people who attack this book show a clear lack of understanding for its thesis. They claim that Johnson doesn't understand that shows like 24 and The Sopranos are fiction and thus can offer no cognitive advantage over other mediums such as reading the classics. Unfortunately the classics are also fictions, so that argument isn't based upon any level of intelligence. What these people fail to realize is that whether or not something is real or fictitious doesn't matter, it's the mental work that one puts into sorting all of the details in their mind that counts, just as it's the mental work put into deciphering the out-of-date language of the classics that was once common-place but now requires a higher level of thinking to absorb correctly, as well as the true literary quality of such books, that places the classics in a literary realm of their own. These skeptics constantly attack Johnson for putting a higher value on "junk media" than true literature when in fact he claims repeatedly that reading is and should be an important part of cognitive development as is study of all fields from history to mathematics. The point he's trying to make is that popular culture is not something that causes "mental atrophy," but something that enhances us in ways that weren't possible less than 100 years ago. The saddest thing is that out of all of these smears not a single one provides an alternative explanation for why IQ scores are on the rise despite this country's addiction to mass media.

Johnson goes to great lengths to assert his belief that reading is important and necessary to cognitive development, but gives credit to so-called "junk media" for the work it does in helping us develop. He claims that the increased complexity of television shows, video games, and the ever-expanding resources available on the internet are aiding our brains in more ways than we know. Citing shows from 24 and The Sopranos to Seinfeld and Friends Johnson easily shows how programming has evolved from shows of self-contained, predictable plotlines to those of multi-episode plot arcs and deeply drawn characters that reward those who watch the show regularly. As for video games: he says that the exploration of the interactive environments helps develop pattern recognition, problem-solving, and easy adaptability to other platforms; the more you play video games, the easier it is to become familiar with a new one and the easier it is to pick up other things as well. In fact, while many more conservative people are constantly up-in-arms about violence in video games, Johnson points out that it is titles like The Sims, which contains no violence whatsoever, which top the bestsellers lists. People are looking for a cognitive challenge and it is the company that provides that challenge that wins out economically.

Johnson's most compelling argument states that it is the veritable cornucopia of accessible mediums that is most effectively improving us mentally. Simply being able to interact with several forms of entertainment on a daily basis and learning to switch effortlessly between them or engage in more than one at the same time has a dazzling effect on our mental capabilities.

Unfortunately for Johnson some of his points fall a little short of the mark. He claims that video games shine for their structure not their content: people look to books for interesting narratives and characters, they turn to video games for the sake of a good puzzle and the mental reward that comes with solving it. The problem with this argument is that it ignores games like the Final Fantasy series, which are heavily plot driven and character oriented. The reward inherent in games such as these is finding out what happens to the characters next. These titles often sell incredibly well because they are like visual, interactive books. Though the language, which is the most important and unique element of the book as a media form, isn't there the character and plot developments are the reward that players seek. They become emotionally attached to the characters and work for upwards of 40 hours just to find out how the story ends. Those who claim that completing such games requires no mental input have clearly never attempted to finish one.

Johnson also gives a bit too much credit to cinema. He cites intelligent quesi-mainstream films like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but fails to mention the rather lackluster box office performance of such films. While there are many examples of intelligent cinema, the public on a whole, it seems, would still rather see an easy action movie than a deep art film. The other glaring omission in this book is that Johnson never brings up popular music, a major part of the world in which we live. While the average level of intelligence present in today's popular music could be argued either way it looks like a cop-out to avoid the topic altogether.

The writing style of this book seems like it would fit better on a personal blog or on a message board, but its points come out surprisingly clear given the general rambling nature of the narrative. Johnson provides visual aides, charts and graphs, where appropriate to help illustrate his point. He steers clear of personal attacks even when it's glaringly obvious that he vehemently disagrees with the recorded statements of many others. While the delivery leaves a little to be desired, the content of this book stands strong. Thank you Steven Johnson for trying to prove to the rest of the world what we have held dear for many years: that our intelligent devotion to alternative media has value after all.

Ironically, personal reviews, like this one and all of the attacks on this book, and the ability to post them for the world to see is one of the things that Johnson cites as unique about the Internet. Being able to reach a wide audience almost instantly gives the general public a much greater incentive to publish original works than it ever had before: a fact that skeptics will implement, but refuse to appreciate.

The statistics don't lie. We are getting smarter, even by the skewed standards employed by most IQ tests. We are also reading less as a society; we are reading less novels anyway. We are filling the void with immersion into alternative forms of entertainment from reality shows to personal webblogs. This wide range of influences allows our brains to develop in a way that was never possible before, it's no wonder we are getting smarter. It's not surprising that this book is being mercilessly torn apart by many, new ideas are always strongly rejected by the status quo, but hopefully it won't be long before the world as a whole can appreciate this important development.

In Everything Bad is Good for You, author Steven Johnson develops his theses:

1. "This is 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" (p. 9).

2. "But the dominant motif is one of decline and atrophy: we're a nation of reality program addicts and Nintendo freaks. Lost in that account is the most interesting trend of all: that the popular culture has been growing increasingly complex over the past few decades, exercising our minds in powerful new ways" (p. 13).

3. "I am to persuade you of two things: 1. By almost all the standards we use to measure reading's cognitive benefits -- attention, memory, following threads, and so on -- the nonliterary popular culture has been steadily growing more challenging over the past thirty years. 2. Increasingly, the nonliterary popular culture is honing different mental skills that are just as important as the ones exercised by reading books" (p. 23).

4. "Some environmental factor (or combination of factors) must be responsible for the increase in the specific forms of intelligence that IQ measures: problem solving, abstract reasoning, pattern recognition, spatial logic" (p. 142).

5. "Parents can sometimes be appalled at the hypnotic effect that television has on toddlers; they see their otherwise vibrant and active children gazing silently, mouth agape at the screen, and they assume the worse: the television is turning their child into a zombie. ...But these expressions are not signs of mental atrophy. They're signs of focus" (p. 181).


Johnson argues that video games, television, movies, and the internet add to one's ability to understand complex patterns, to probe for answers, and to better understand humans and the human drama. Toward that end, after noting there exist few studies confirming his hypotheses, he notes "But these studies are still rarities, which means the strong argument of the Sleeper Curve is still conjecture" (p. 208).

What do I think? I think Johnson is looking for the ether filling all the space in the universe. And he won't find it.

I happen to agree that the mental exercising in some video games is remarkable. I see less of it in Seinfeld (and I am a fan), and less still in the megafilm Lord of the Rings. The issue Johnson doesn't address, and it is critical, is how much exposure to these stimuli do you need to get the benefits he suggests? Johnson gives no amount here, thus seems to state that 10 hours is good, 100 hours is better, and 1000+ hours is best. I keep thinking that addition and times tables work great, up to a point. When do you practice them, and when do you go on to other things? I mean, 1000 hours of times tables? Don't you pick up most of your skill in World of WarCraft in the first 10 levels? Even if you pick up new skills/connections/threads/patterns every level up to level 60, do you still get something out of playing for another 100 hours?

And I kept being confused with the unspoken alternatives. Of course, if you are not watching television or playing video games, you are doing something else. And what part of driving downtown in a car does not involve complex pattern recognition? Isn't life complex? Doesn't Sense and Sensibility allow for complex thoughts? You can perform addition with a calculator or with an abacus. When you are proficient with one or the other, does it make sense to argue that one teaches you more things than another? Hmm.

Finally, it is interesting that Johnson left out the societal problems with obesity, type II diabetes (previously called adult onset diabetes until too many children developed symptoms), and a reduction in writing and speaking skills. Do video games and television assist with these problems, or add to them? I think it is astounding that these health issues are not even mentioned.

"Yesterday's brainiac is today's simpleton," Johnson states. At best this is simply oversimplification, and at worst it is unhealthy, wrong, and misleading.

I gave this book 3 stars. The first 2/3 was interesting, and already I've gotten into some vigorous discussions because of it. That's a good sign for a book. However, I cringe when I think of some people using this as carte blanche permission to play more and watch television more. Johnson does NOT recommend this, and in this case, I agree.

Steven Johnson relishes his role as provocateur as he tries to convince his readers that mesmerizing video games, trash TV, and web surfing are making us smarter. Even the title of the book seems chosen to raise skeptical eyebrows. Of course, he doesn't mean *everything* bad, so it was a relief when I eventually discovered that he finds some junk TV to be utterly without merit. Nonetheless, Johnson's message is radical enough.

The basic argument is that activities like video games and even reality TV shows require complex mental processing by the viewer which can improve general cognitive functioning. For example, many contemporary TV dramas, according to Johnson, require viewers to retain information over multiple episodes and piece together story fragments in order to follow the action. Reality programs require mastery of intricate social networks. Dealing with all this is supposed to make us smarter.

The actual evidence for these benefits is thin. Johnson draws his main support from a phenomenon called the "Flynn effect" which refers to data showing that IQ in industrialized countries has increased about 3 points per decade over the last 60 years or so. He says this is due in part to recreational activities like TV and video games. Of course, it could also be due to rising ozone in the atmosphere or cosmic rays from alien spacecraft.

The book is well written and thought provoking. Johnson presents a surprising and possibly important hypothesis that will undoubtedly stimulate serious social science research. It is way too early to tell whether he is right or not, but he has performed a valuable service by articulating such an interesting hypothesis so well. I recommend the book.

My headline should say it all. I can see arguments for why all of these things are SOMEWHAT "good" for you--after all, things are usually have two sides to them--but this particular presentation of the argument is too full of logical fallacies and faulty premises to pull it off. All kinds of sleights of hand are employed here.

Just to give one example. The author sets out to debunk the popular idea that video games are nothing more than instant gratification. As evidence that they are not instant gratification, he points to the fact that many video games are very difficult and frustrating to complete--so difficult that one needs a guide to solve them. He compares these guides to the Cliff's Notes one uses to help understand a novel.

First of all, while this argument shows that SOME video games, such as Sim City, are not forms of instant gratification (the author simply ignores the types of games that would work against this thesis), it simply raises another problem about such games--the kind of complexity Johnson describes is an entirely mechanical one--taking certain steps to earn your character money so he can buy a house so he can buy another house so he can own a whole block...etc. The "complexity" described in these video games is no more complex than the process a bird goes through to build a nest. It's a big assembly line.

The comparison of video game guides to Cliff's Notes is deeply flawed. Cliff's Notes tell you certain things about a book, but they do not necessarily give you a "key" to help you "solve" the book--and of course, they could not hope to do that, because books are much more complex than cardboard puzzles. In fact, as any English teacher knows, Cliff's Notes are often nothing more than a poor substitute for independent thinking about literature. Video game guides, on the other hand, are in fact evidence of the entirely mundane reality one encounters in video games. Essentially, these guides help you cheat. There is no way in a lot of these games to find certain things that you need (magic keys, etc.)--and being smart has nothing to do with whether you find them or not--it's simply a matter of looking long enough and remembering where you've already gone. Again...takes a long time, sure, and you have to push the button over and over. But in the end, it's no more "complicated" than an Easter egg hunt.

There are similar sleights of hand employed in the following chapters of the book, not really worth enumerating.

I was very disappointed by this book, because, although I am no fan of popular culture by any means, I'm no old-fashioned old geezer either, and I do think it is always interesting to question our basic assumptions about things.

If anything, this book does exactly the opposite of what it sets out to do. It shows the kinds of totally flawed comparisons and arguments that often spring up when people try to defend popular culture. This creates the impression (probably false) that somehow, this popular culture is CAUSING people to think that their poor reasoning passes for wisdom.

Wouldn't it have been more interesting to include the dark side too? Most things are both "bad" for you in some ways and "good" for you in others--this seems a more enlightening way to discuss popular culture.

This book was definitly an interesting read, but I feel like its lacking in substance.

Johnson tries to prove, for example, that todays television shows make us smarter than those of the 70's because they require a viewer to keep track of more characters and plot lines. But he fails to prove that this is a valid way of measuring complexity, or that keeping track of more plot lines and characters actually makes you think a substantial amount more. He doesn't actually analyze many television shows to prove this statistic, but chooses a few TV shows that he believes are representative of the era. To really prove the point, I think one would need to come up with some sort of data for all shows on television at a given time, but he does not. Even if he does convince you that TV is smarter today than in the 70's, that doesn't mean it makes you smarter than you would be if you hadn't watched TV at all.

He formulates similar opinions for movies, and games as well.

His writing is quick and easy to read, though I thought it a little redundant. Also, the citations annoy me. There aren't any. But in the back of the book, there are sentences referencing studies and an explanation. The problem is that many information that is stated as fact is not cited at all in the back. And its hard to pick out since there aren't any footnotes or anything of that nature to let you know what information he aquired from reputable sources and what information is opinion stated as fact.

Overall, I'd spend your money on something else.

The review by C. Helfer changed my mind about the kind of review that I was going to write. Initially I was going to point out that while I agreed with Johnson's main thesis--that many of the popular forms of entertainment that many people criticize are actually better for cultivating our minds than commonly assumed--his presentation of his argument was not especially deep. In other words, the book is a bit lightweight. If you are convinced that computer games and television are bad for you, then reading the book could provide some useful consciousness raising. But I think a stronger case could be made than that made by Johnson.

C. Helfer's review, however, needs addressing and provides a marvelous example of the kind of wrong-headedness that the book addresses. To state baldly that it has been proven that watching TV is bad for you is simply silly and rushes over a host of distinctions that have to be made. First and foremost, what kind of television watching? Most people, when they criticize watching TV, have a very specific form of viewing in mind: an utterly passive, noninteractive trance in front of the tube, in which they barely think about what they are watching. In defense of C. Helfer, this was also the notion of TV viewing that drove television studies until recently and is the conception of the average viewer that the network executives work with. C. Helfer mentions Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who popularized the concept of flow, but a slightly different concept of Flow with regard to television was coined much earlier by the English literary theorist Raymond Williams. The latter meant by Flow merely the way that TV planners planned an evening schedule, commercial flowing into show preview into opening credits into another commercial and so forth for three hours. Most studies of television viewing have this model in mind as well.

What the television debunkers have lost sight of is a complete revolution in both the quality of TV and the way it has often been viewed over the past fifteen years. Any study of TV viewing that is older than ten years is pretty much of zero value. Williams's concept of Flow has been bumped aside by the notion of appointment television. For instance, I watch a great number of television shows, but I absolutely never watch TV in the way that Williams and the vast majority of those studying the effects of TV imagine. When people ask if I watch TV I honestly answer "No." What I do is I turn on the TV for a very specific show, watch it intently and engagedly and never passively, and then turn the TV off when I have finished. More and more this typifies the viewing habits of people.

Most of those whose image of all TV viewers is that of the passive zombie are usually also unaware of just how extremely good TV has gotten in the past fifteen years. In fact, many TV shows are better than and provide a much richer viewing experience than the vast majority of movies that are made, whether blockbuster, independent, foreign, or avant-garde. Johnson mentions this and gets correct one of the major reasons: the vast advantage that TV has over film in terms of time. No movie can be as rich as any good TV show since it has at most 180 minutes to work with (more frequently 90-115) while an average show has around 940 minutes each season.

Here is where I think Johnson's book is at its weakest. Following some other early defenders of the notion of Quality Television, Johnson is overwhelmingly biased towards--or at least mentions almost exclusively--shows with a strong tinge of realism. Throughout much of his discussion he seems to have a good knowledge of recent TV history, but from about 1990 to the present he seems to be on shaky ground. He is correct in identifying the complexity of THE SOPRANOS and is right about the role that HILL STREET BLUES played in beginning the development of Quality Television, but he rarely mentions the key shows in expanding television narrative through the nineties and beyond. In terms of actual influence on other shows, THE SOPRANOS has had little or none and that is because all the work had been done by other shows of which it was the beneficiary.

As briefly as possible, the eighties saw a number of shows take up the multiple short story arc format pioneered by HILL STREET BLUES such as CAGNEY AND LACEY, CHINA BEACH, thirtysomething (a show reprehensible because of its image of women, but important narratively), L. A. LAW, and ST. ELSEWHERE. But in 1990 David Lynch's TWIN PEAKS took this all to a new level by both elevating the production levels to something very close to what we find in many movies and by attempting a longer narrative arc that would extend to a far, far greater length than what one would find in any of the aforementioned eighties shows. Unfortunately, TWIN PEAKS fell apart in its second season, but three years later saw THE X-FILES, which not only attempted to match the production values of TWIN PEAKS, but in its mythology episodes spun out a narrative that spanned several seasons. The alien colonization arc that spread over the show's first six seasons was up to that point the longest visual narrative told on either TV or in film. One might reply that the Soaps did this, as Johnson himself points out. But one leading book on the soaps is entitled STORIES WITHOUT END, and that captures the fact that the Soaps don't tell a story, but an endless succession of mini-stories in which nothing of consequence gets resolved. Also, the production values on the Soaps are exceedingly low. In 1997 BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER debuted, and carried narrative to the next level, essentially telling a self-contained story each season while at the same time maintaining several other arcs that extended to part of a season or over the course of two or more seasons. With the exception of LOST, which is now attempting to tell a single major story in the course of the show as a whole, there really hasn't been much development narratively beyond what TWIN PEAKS, THE X-FILES, and BUFFY established (the major creative figure in LOST, Damon Lindelhof, cites BUFFY as the show's major influence), and even Johnson's THE SOPRANOS has benefited from the establishment of the long narrative arc developed by these shows. So, my complaint with Johnson's assessment of TV is twofold: first, he misses the crucial shows in the making of the latest incarnation of Quality Television and, second, he privileges the number of arcs over the quality of central and major arcs. In fact, having many short arcs can sometimes disguise an inability to tell a truly compelling central story. And in quality of story, I'll take BUFFY over THE SOPRANOS any day (just as academics broadly have found more to talk about in BUFFY than in THE SOPRANOS, have found it to be narratively richer than THE SOPRANOS, as good as that show is). Of course, Johnson seems to labor under a bias for realism. The trend for the past several decades has increasingly been in favor of realism among some critics (though by no means all). But if you are a student of the history of literature, you will know that historically this has not always been the case. There is comparatively little realism in Shakespeare, Dante, Homer, Spenser, Virgil, Milton, Kafka, or even Joyce or Dickens. I think personally that genre shows actually have an advantage in exploring many important issues through narrative, and I think I know why, but I don't have the space to expand on this here. Let me just state baldly that I think the preference for more realistic shows such as THE SOPRANOS over shows like BUFFY is less based on relative aesthetic merits than biases (though for those who haven't seen BUFFY, that silly name remains the greatest impediment, despite the fact that the one word I see applied to the show more than any other by those who have viewed it at length is "intelligent").

Although I have only anecdotal evidence for this, I also suspect that those who do watch TV by vegging out in fron to the tube do not like shows like BUFFY and LOST and THE SOPRANOS. The complaint I've had from casual viewers is that they find them too demanding and that you have to keep following the story to stay up with what is going on. These kinds of viewers tend to drift to LAW AND ORDER, CSI, ACCORDING TO JIM, and other shows that are not driven by multiple arcs or long term narratives.

One word of caution to all those who are arguing in their reviews that computer games and television are both harmful is that they don't keep in mind Johnson's several reminders that he advocates only moderation in any of these activities. He absolutely does not argue that a vast number of hours devoted to any one activity is at all a good thing. I would like to add one word here and that is that I have found that with computer games that it is very close to impossible for many to be played in moderation. I remember years ago an article in WIRED entitled "Should DIABLO be a controlled substance?" I used to play vast amounts of online computer games, in particular Asheron's Call and World of Warcraft. I had to give up playing such games simply because they ate up so much of my time. I do think that this is one aspect of game playing that Johnson doesn't adequately address. Playing World of Warcraft isn't harmful in and of itself; it is harmful to play World of Warcraft 35 hours in a week during which you also work full time. Games harm not by what they do directly, but what they do indirectly by keeping you from so many other activities. I find I can play offline games in far greater moderation. This is a problem that I think Johnson passed over too easily.

Finally, to those who think that TV viewing of the kind I advocate--TV by appointment, wherein the viewer actively engages the show just as they would engage a novel--simply cannot be considered a good activity, I would like to summon as support someone who actually didn't watch TV himself, C. S. Lewis. In AN EXPERIMENT IN CRITICISM Lewis argued that we should not judge books or other works of art on the basis of whether they are good or bad. Instead, he thought we should assess them on whether they promote good or bad reading. A pulp romance novel after being finished is used up for good. A complex novel, on the other hand, will elicit detailed reflection, discussion, passionate rereading, discussions with friends, and perhaps essays or books about that novel. A work that actually engenders that kind of response, in Lewis's belief, inspires good reading. A Quality Television show like BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER promotes the same kind of response. GILLIGAN'S ISLAND or LAW AND ORDER does not. Those who feel that all TV viewing is harmful should investigate the vast amount of scholarship by professors in universities around the world done on BUFFY and other TV shows. These are not anthropological or sociological studies about the viewers of such shows (as was the case in the seventies and eighties on Trekkies), but textual studies on the actual content. I think one would be hard pressed to explain how a medium that was inherently harmful would be able to produce such a vast array of scholarly reflection.

Note (6/17/06): Johnson evidently has taken a lot of flak about not mentioning BUFFY even once in his book and is now centering many of his presentations around the show, acknowledging that it is one of the best examples of what he was trying to represent in the book. So while it does not change the contents of the book, he has responded admirably to this criticism.

Steven Johnson claims that TV is making us smarter. (Explicitly in his New York Times article and implicitly in his book.)

In support of this bold claim, he offers absolutely no scientific evidence. Yet his book is so skillfully written that he has managed to convince a huge number of people that he is correct. (It helps that so many people want to be convinced.)

How does he accomplish this sleight-of-hand?

In his book, he references a number of studies showing that video games improve various types of thought processes. The number he cites for TV. Zero.

On the other hand there are numerous studies showing that kids who watch excessive TV (over 1 to 2 hours per day), tend to do worse in school, don't concentrate as well, have problems with language and reading, etc...

By describing in loving detail the complexities of both video
games and various TV shows, and then referencing these scientific studies (for video games) he gives the impression that both have a similar effect on the brain. This couldn't be further from the truth. Playing Video games involve effort and concentration, while watching TV actually slows down the viewers' brain waves, hence the zombie look.

For more on TV's effects on the mind, see the Scientific American cover story (Feb 2002) "Television Addiction Is No Mere Metaphor".

The arguments he uses to support his contention are that TV is becoming more and more complex and the Flynn Effect. The Flynn Effect is the fact that IQ's in the U.S. and other countries have been rising about 3 points per decade. What Mr. Johnson fails to mention is that this effect in the U.S. started in 1918. TV wasn't even invented until the 1940s, and didn't become commonplace until the 1950s. Mr. Johnson also fails to mention the fact that SAT scores have fallen substantially over the past 40 years.

Even if TV shows are getting more complex (which is entirely plausible considering the amount of time and money invested in TV) there still is no evidence that that translates into smarter viewers.

On the subject of violent TV causing increased aggression, Mr. Johnson is completely dismissive. He argues that because violent crime has gone down over the last 10 years, that that proves there is no real connection. Never mind that the U.S. has the highest incarceration rate in the *entire* world. Also never mind the over 1000 scientific studies done over the past 30 years showing a link between violent TV and aggression (for both children and adults).

The editorial review describes him as a science writer, but for my money, PR hack would be much more accurate.