Erik Marshall

In Part I of Everything Bad is Good for You, Steven Johnson outlines various ways in which media have become more complex in the last several decades, and begins to argue that this complexity has caused a change in the way people think, leading to higher IQs and problem-solving abilities. Some of the more compelling work in this Part is in the video game section, where he talks about the activities of probing and telescoping, which refer respectively to the acts of continuously searching through video game environments and looking forward to ultimate goals while simultaneously paying attention to more immediate goals. In talking about one of the differences between games and books he says:

You can still enjoy a book without explicitly concentrating on where the narrative will take you two chapters out, but in gameworlds you need that long-term planning as much as you need present-tense focus.

He doesn’t prefer one to the other, but stresses that they work different abilities. His analysis here is convincing and nuanced, drawing many parallels not only between video games and novels, but also between different types of writing and how they affect cognition.

He also talks about television, much of which was excerpted in that NY Times article, and which I have alraedy addressed. One of the things he does here, though, is to compare reality tv to video games in that in both the rules are not known at the outset, and challenge the viewer to figure them out as they go. His argument that television is more complex and relies less on “flashing arrows” — signs that tell the viewer that something is significant — and plunges the viewer into arcane language and multithreaded chaos parallels the fact that, in video games, the player often does not know what the rules are in the beginning, but must figure them out, even as they change.

Reality television provides the iltimate testimony to the cultural dominance of games in this moment of pop culture history. Early television took its cues from the stage…In the Nintendo age, we expect our televised entertainment to take a new form: a series of competitive tests, growing more challenging over time. (92)

The other factor that reality tv activates is social networks in the form of websites and fora, but also in the sense of viewers actively participating in figuring out complex social interactions based on subtle cues, which activates different abilities than traditional tv.

He writes also about film, citing a few examples, contrasting Star Wars with Lord of the Rings in terms of complexity, and rightly points out that television shows have much more times, in the tens to hundreds of hours, to flesh out relationships, while movies have a few hours. LOTR, he points out, is ten hours long uncut, so can allow a little more complexity.

So far, I am still unconvinced of the causal effect between more complex viewing and more complex thinking, but he hasn’t really gotten to that part yet. While Part I sets up the complexity of new media, an argument I do agree with, Part II sets up the causal-cognitive evidence. I look forward to reading that, and when I am finished, I will report back.