The Grand Hall, buzzing with anticipation on the morning of Tuesday, October 21st, 2008, was brimming with students and faculty eager to welcome this year's guest lecturer for the Freshman Writing Program, Steven Johnson, who would discuss his book Everything Bad is Good For You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter.
Johnson, the best-selling author of five books including Mind Wide Open, has led a multifaceted and high profile career composed of accomplishments like writing for the Wall Street Journal, appearing as a guest on John Stewart's The Daily Show, and being listed as one of the 50 people who matter most on the Internet.
In his spirited introduction Dr. Scott Warnock, director of the Freshman Writing Program, explained that Everything Bad is Good For You encourages the reader to "reject the easy answers, and think long and hard about alternative answers."
"Johnson reaches out rhetorically to his audience," Warnock said.
The three audiences Johnson intended Everything Bad is Good For You to impact are what he dubbed the "older generation," who would be enlightened in hopes of promoting a greater tolerance regarding youth culture, the "academic audience," who could use his work as a teaching tool (as Drexel has done), and the "younger generation," who will appreciate the sophistication of Johnson's pop culture theories.
In his book, Johnson walks the reader through his argument in hopes of eliminating initial, intuitive assumptions. He raises the question, "Is pop culture today helping or hurting our kids?"
When addressing this issue, people tend to evaluate the quality of popular culture through the lens of morality, citing the highly violent, sexual, and graphic content built into most forms of mass entertainment. Unsettled by this apparent trend, Johnson brought to light a new perspective, explaining that a moral standpoint is not the only one from which we should examine pop culture. We need to consider the cognitive element essential in exploring various forms of mass media.
About his theory Johnson writes, "It's the story of how system analysis, probability theory, pattern recognition and – amazingly enough – good old-fashioned patience became indispensable tools for anyone trying to make sense of modern pop culture" (Johnson 9).
He makes an argument that the Sleeper Curve, an undercurrent of increasingly complex forms of media and entertainment, is taking over.
In his introduction, Johnson proposes, "This kind of education is not happening in classrooms or museums; it's happening in living rooms and basements, on PCs and television screens. 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" (Johnson 9).
He refutes the idea that "the masses" want dumbed-down material, or simple pleasures. Pop culture is becoming increasingly intellectual, and the younger generation boasts the statistics to prove it.
When investigating the complexity in modern forms of entertainment, Johnson asked himself (and the audience), "How much mental exercise does the average person get from popular culture today?"
He answered this by explaining the three levels on which popular culture has become more complex in recent decades: content, participation and interface.
When your little brother grabs the wireless controller and sits down in front of the plasma screen, about to embark on a virtual adventure, do not underestimate the skills he is developing in the process. The game Sin City for example, calls for players to understand how a system works. Twenty years ago, there were no games requiring the user to choose a government, legal system, religious affiliation, labor system, and economic set up simply to play the game, let alone win. Winning requires a finessed knowledge and exploration of the causal relationships between these items.
Although it is arguably a more passive and less engaging form of media, the complexity in television content has increased staggeringly.
"Lost," Johnson revealed, "has the most complicated narrative structure of any television show I have encountered so far."
We have seen the basic plot structure, a group of people stranded and trying to survive on a deserted island, before in Gilligan's Island. However the extensive list of characters, the temporal structure of the narrative, the unique storytelling devices, and the various scales of knowledge encompassed by the characters in the show and the audience watching the show, has made the phenomenon of Lost far more complex than its precursor.
Even reality television is becoming more complicated; for instance, players in Survivor face far greater challenges than did contestants on The Price is Right. The fans of Survivor also contribute more to the program by picking favorites and becoming involved in the narrative action. This idea of fans proactively participating in their favorite television programs was Johnson's next point of focus.
Turning back to Lost, he found the level of viewer involvement and interaction to be extraordinary. From frenzied fan clubs, to blogs making predictions about the show's many mysteries, this new sense of community surrounding television shows like Lost furthers illuminates the rising sophistication in television today.
Similar to the web community surrounding Lost, the program Buffy the Vampire Slayer has an entire site, buffyology.com, devoted to examining the metaphorical nature or moral connotations inherent in the program. People are cognitively and emotionally aware of hidden values the show perpetuates, and more importantly, discussing these moral undertones with one another.
"A narrative universe is not just something to be passively consumed," Johnson pointed out. People are becoming connected with the programs, and in turn, each other.
The complexity of interface design elements implicated in both television shows and gaming, has risen exponentially. The younger generation has an increased ability to take in complicated visual structures. Games featuring networks containing huge amounts of data, which the players must work together to manage, have become exceptionally popular. Interface is where communication begins, so forms of entertainment fostering the use of shared networks and databases prepare players for real-world networking interactions.
Along with changes in the interface of gaming, the Internet has made substantial progression in the development of higher quality structures as well. The transition from Yahoo to Youtube exemplifies this shift. Taking Yahoo's search capacity one step further, Youtube includes features like audio, video, interactive commentary, and suggestions for related materials, each aspect complimenting the next. This generation has learned to adapt and re-shape old technologies into new, useful phenomena.
Despite that fact that older folks are fretting over the fates of their children, young people today have the highest IQ scores, the greatest aversion to violence, the most political awareness, and the most entrepreneurial drive in decades. The Sleeper Curve predicts this cultural environment of increased sensibility and awareness will created a continued upward trajectory.
Johnson brought his lecture to a close by reassuring the younger members in the audience, "We have bigger problems to worry about than how you guys are doing; you guys are actually doing alright."
