Everything Bad Is Good For You

1
Everything Bad Is Good For You

• Steven Johnson

2
The Elite Perspective

• 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.
  (George Will)

3
The Sleeper Curve

• What is the sleeper curve?

4
The Sleeper Curve

• What is the sleeper curve?
• Popular culture is becoming more intellectually
  demanding, not less.

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The Sleeper Curve

• What is the sleeper curve?
• Popular culture is becoming more intellectually
  demanding, not less.
• Emphasis on cognition over content
• Todays popular culture may not be showing us
  the righteous path. But it is making us smarter
  (14).

6
Games

• The intellectual nourishment of reading books is
  so deeply ingrained in our assumptions that its
  hard to contemplate a different viewpoint. But
  as McLuhan famously observed, the problem with
  judging new cultural systems on their own terms
  is that the presence of the recent past
  inevitably colors your vision of the emerging
  form, highlighting the flaws and imperfections
  (18).
• What if games came first? (see page 19)

7
Games

• Different media are good at different tasks,
  therefore we should view a particular medium as a
  specialized tool
• The very fact that I am presenting this argument
  to you in the form of a book and not a television
  drama or a video game should make it clear that I
  believe the printed word remains the most
  powerful vehicle for conveying complicated
  information (23).

8
Games

• Two arguments
• By almost all the standards we use to measure
  readings cognitive benefits attention, memory,
  following threads, and so on the nonliterary
  popular culture has been steadily growing more
  challenging over the past thirty years (23).

9
Games

• Two arguments
• Increasingly, the nonliterary popular culture is
  honing different mental skills that are just as
  important as the ones exercised by reading books
  (23).

10
Games

• Evidence
• The increasing difficulty level of videogames.
  Compare Pong or PacMan to Everquest or Ultima.
• The emergence of game guides.
• The SimCity 2000 example.
• Why are children able to internalize
  sophisticated sets of rules while playing games,
  but seem to have more difficulty in the
  classroom?

11
Games

• Neurological reward circuitry
• The dopamine system is a kind of accountant
  keeping track of expected rewards, and sending
  out an alert in the form of lowered dopamine
  levels when those rewards dont arrive as
  promised (34).
• Seeking circuitry Where our brain wiring is
  concerned, the craving instinct triggers a desire
  to explore (35).

12
Games

• Neurological reward circuitry
• The Tetris example.
• Just as Tetris streamlines the fuzzy world of
  visual reality to a core set of interacting
  shapes, most games offer a fictional world where
  rewards are larger, and more vivid, more clearly
  defined, than life (36).

13
Games

• Games harness and manipulate seeking behavior
  in players based upon the neurological reward
  circuitry!
• In the initial stages of play, you may be
  dazzled by the games graphics. But most of the
  time, when youre hooked on a game, what draws
  you in is an elemental form of desire the desire
  to see the next thing (37).

14
Games

• How do we seek (and make decisions) in games?
• Probing
• Telescoping
• Probing describes the active learning that occurs
  when new knowledge is acquired based on real-time
  interaction with a system. In the past, this has
  been referred to as tinkering.

15
Games

• Probing makes casual use of the scientific
  method
• James Paul Gee 1. Probe, 2. Hypothesize, 3.
  Reprobe, 4. Rethink.
• Probing often takes the form of seeking out the
  limits of the simulation, the points at which the
  illusion of reality breaks down, and you can
  sense thats all just a bunch of algorithms
  behind the curtain (45).

16
Games

• ENEMIES MOVE IN PREDICTABLE PATTERNS

17
Games

• Telescoping The players ability to coordinate
  among immediate, intermediate, and long-term
  goals.
• Telescoping IS NOT Multitasking.

18
Games

• One of the most important things in understanding
  the intellectual benefits of gaming is to
  separate cognition from content. In some
  respects, videogame puzzles strongly resemble
  word problems that you might find on an SAT or
  GRE.
• Games are about learning how to make decisions
  which create order out of chaos.

19
Television

• The same thesis that applied to games that
  content is not an indicator of cognitive
  complexity can be applied to television.
• Television programs have become vastly more
  complex since the advent of the medium.
• So if were going to start tracking swear words
  and wardrobe malfunctions, we ought to at least
  include another line on the graph one that
  charts the cognitive demands that televised
  narratives place on their viewers. That line,
  too, is trending upward at a dramatic rate (63).

20
Television

• Television has grown in cognitive complexity in
  at least two areas
• Multiple threading.
• Flashing arrows.
• Social networks.

21
Television

• Multiple threading
• Part of the cognitive work comes from following
  multiple threads, keeping often densely
  interwoven plotlines distinct in your head as you
  watch. But another part involves the viewers
  filling in making sense of information that
  has been either deliberately withheld or
  deliberately left obscure (63).

22
Television

• Multiple threading
• Dragnet (single thread)
• Starsky and Hutch (elementary double thread)
• Hill Street Blues (multiple threads thematic
  complexity)
• The Sopranos (multiple threads thematic and
  structural complexity)

23
Television

• Flashing arrows
• Texture (total visual information in a scene) Vs.
  Substance (the information in the scene that you
  need to know in order to understand the
  narrative).
• Flashing arrows are those cinematic devices
  (e.g., camera/editing techniques and conventions)
  that separate substance from texture.

24
Television

• Flashing arrows reduce the amount of analytic
  work you need to make sense of a story. All you
  have to do is follow the arrows (74).
• When flashing arrows are removed, audiences must
  concentrate in order to understand whats
  happening. Think of West Wing, ER, 24.

25
Television

• Another byproduct of the loss of flashing arrows
  is the requirement of a tolerance of ambiguity in
  the viewer. Much like in games, a viewer must be
  willing to temporarily deal with confusion and
  uncertainty. The viewer must also be adept at
  learning on the fly and generating/testing
  hypotheses about outcomes.

26
Television

• What about comedy?
• The roles of intertextuality and in-joking
• The need for multiple viewings (in market terms,
  this also anticipates syndication).
• The Simpsons
• Seinfeld
• The Critic

27
Television

• What about Reality Television?
• A relationship between reality programming and
  gaming. If early TV took its cues from
  vaudeville and three-act stage plays, Reality TV
  takes its cues from the world of the game.
• Partially defined rules and the need to cultivate
  tolerance of ambiguity, learn on the fly, and
  make/test hypotheses.
• Navigating social environments.

28
Television

• Social intelligence The ability to read and
  interpret the emotions and motivations of others.
  The AQ score.
• Reality shows, in turn, challenge our emotional
  intelligence and our AQ. They are, in a sense,
  elaborately staged group psychology experiments
  (99).

29
Television

• The importance of social intelligence
• Thanks to our biological and cultural heritage,
  we live in large bands of interacting humans, and
  people whose minds are skilled at visualizing all
  the relationships in those bands are likely to
  thrive, while those whose minds have difficulty
  keeping track are invariably handicapped (109).

30
Television

• Reality TV and politics? Using AQ and social
  intelligence to evaluate candidates?
• What would Postman say? (see pgs. 100-101)
• What do you think about this argument?

31
Television

• Social networks
• It isnt only reality television that has the
  potential to improve social intelligence. Think
  of how the level of intricacy in the
  relationships among television characters has
  increased
• From Dallas to 24.

32
Internet and Film

• The Internet
• Supporting material
• Interface comprehension
• From television to Google?
• Is film tapped out in terms of its ability to
  teach us?

33
Conclusion

• The importance of collateral learning
• Form vs. Content
• What does the form require of us cognitively?