Everything Bad Is Good for You (26 page)

So the Sleeper Curve suggests that the popular culture is not doing as good a job at training our minds to follow a sustained textual argument or narrative that doesn't involve genuine interactivity. (As we've seen in gaming culture, kids are incredibly talented at focusing for long stretches when the form is truly participatory.) The good news, of course, is that kids aren't being exclusively educated by their Nintendo machines or their cell phones. We still have schools and parents to teach wisdom that the popular culture fails to impart. The Dr. Spock manual had it half right after all: parents should “foster in [their] children a love of reading and the printed word from the start.” They just shouldn't underestimate the virtues of other media as well.

But what about all the sex and violence? Having made the case for the cognitive challenges of today's popular culture, it's only fair to return to the question of morals. Even if you accept the premise that a whole host of intellectual tools—our pattern recognition skills, our ability to probe and telescope, to map complicated narratives—have been enhanced by progressive trends in the popular culture, you can still reasonably object that all those improvements don't cancel out the declining moral or behavioral standards advocated by these forms. In which case the Sleeper Curve would only be a consolation prize—we're raising a generation of cognitive superstars who are nonetheless ethically rudderless. Intelligent, yes, but without values.

I question that scenario for several reasons. First, I suspect we seriously overestimate the extent to which our core values are transmitted to us via the media. Most people understand that the characters on the screen are fictitious ones, and their flaws are there to amuse and entertain us, and not give us ethical guidance. Parents and peer groups are still vastly more influential where values are concerned than Tony Soprano or the carjackers of
Grand Theft Auto.
And the truth is most shows and games and movies still gravitate toward traditional morality play structures in the end: the good guys still win out, and they usually do it by being honest and playing by the rules. For every
Sopranos
or
Grand Theft Auto
there are a dozen
West Wing
s or
Zelda
s, fairy tales of earnest good intentions and civic pride.

That some of the culture today does push at the boundaries of acceptable or healthy moral values shouldn't surprise us, because it is in the nature of myth and storytelling to explore the edges of a society's accepted beliefs and conventions. Popular stories rarely flourish in environments of perfect moral clarity; they tend to blossom at exactly the spaces where some established order is being questioned or tested. We're still retelling the Oedipus myth precisely because it revolved around the violation of fundamental human values. Stories of perfectly happy families—where all laws are obeyed and no values are challenged—don't captivate us in the same way. (Even
The Brady Bunch
required two preexisting nuclear families to break up for its own narrative to take flight.) So when we see the popular culture exploring behavior that many see as morally bankrupt, we need to remind ourselves that deviating from an ethical norm is not just an old story. In a real sense, it's where stories begin.

Certainly it is true that the media today is more violent than it has ever been before, at least in terms of the physical carnage willingly re-created on the screen. Violence has always been a constant in the narratives we tell ourselves—it's part of that tendency of narrative to seek out the extremes of human experience. The difference now is that we get to see the bodily details of that violence in ways that would have been unimaginable just fifty years ago. Video games, in particular, have grown dramatically more violent in the past fifteen years, as the graphical capabilities of the modern PC have enabled ever more realistic displays of bloodshed.

The question is whether that violence has an effect on the mind that apprehends it. It should go without saying at this point that I believe different forms of media can alter our brains in significant ways; the premise of the Sleeper Curve adheres to that principle: more complex popular entertainment is creating minds that are more adept at certain kinds of problem-solving. But violence is part of the
content
of popular media, and as I have explained throughout the preceding pages, the content of most entertainment has less of an impact than the kind of thinking the entertainment forces you to do. This is why we urge parents to instill a general love of reading in their children, without worrying as much about
what
they're reading—because we believe there is a laudable cognitive benefit that comes just from the act of reading alone, irrespective of the content. The same principle applies to television or film or games.

By any measure, the content of a
24
episode is more violent and disturbing than an episode of
My Three Sons.
But
24
makes the viewer
think
in ways that earlier shows never dared; it makes them analyze complex situations, track social networks, fill in information withheld by the creators. The great majority of television viewers understand that the violence they encounter on these contemporary shows is fiction; they understand that they should not look to Tony Soprano for moral guidance, or model their real-world driving on their
Grand Theft Auto
excursions. But the mental exercise they undergo in watching these shows or playing these games is not fiction. Think of those test subjects whose visual intelligence improved after playing the war game
Medal of Honor
; they trained their perceptual systems to perform at a higher level by running around shooting at things in a military simulation. That much is clear. The question is whether that experience also made them more likely to pick up a gun in actual life, more likely to resort to violence in solving real-world problems.

If the subject matter of popular entertainment truly had a significant impact on our behavior (and especially the behavior of the younger generations) then logically we should expect to see very different trends in real-world society. Over the last ten years—a period of unprecedented
fictional
violence in the American household, thanks to
Quake
and Quentin Tarantino films and Tony Soprano—the country simultaneously experienced the most dramatic drop in violent crime in its history. Yes, the Columbine shooters were most likely influenced by playing violent games like
Quake,
but as tragic as that event was, we don't analyze social trends by looking at isolated single examples; we look at broad patterns in the society, and the broad pattern of the last decade is less violence, not more. That improvement is most telling among precisely the demographic groups allegedly at risk for media-influenced violence. In late 2004, the Departments of Justice and Education released a joint study that showed violent crime in the nation's schools had been literally cut in half over the ten-year period from 1992 to 2002, dropping from forty-eight to twenty-four incidents per 100,000 students.

Now, it is theoretically possible that violent media has nevertheless been provoking violent acts throughout that period, but those effects have been masked by the other, pacifying forces at work in society: better policing, higher incarceration rates, or low unemployment. Perhaps we would have had only
ten
violent acts per 100,000 students if it weren't for
Grand Theft Auto.
(Of course, it's just as likely that exposure to violent media—particularly in the participatory mode offered by games—functions as a safety valve for kids who might otherwise be inclined to express their aggression in the real world, and thereby causes violence to decrease.) The one thing we know for certain is this: If there is some positive correlation between exposure to fictional violence and violent behavior, its effects are by definition much weaker than the other social trends that shape violence in society.

Does that mean anything goes? I'm often asked what the Sleeper Curve means for the practical decisions that parents have to make about regulating their children's spare time. I realize that, in writing this book, I have set myself up to be misrepresented as the guy who argues that kids should be allowed to play
Doom
all day, and never open a novel. So let me be clear for the parents who are reading this. Yes, the trends are toward more media complexity; yes, games and television shows and films have cognitive rewards that we should better understand and value. But some of those cultural works are more rewarding than others.

In pointing out some of the ways that popular culture has improved our minds, I am not arguing that parents and other caregivers should stop paying attention to the way their children amuse themselves. What I
am
arguing for is a change in the criteria we use to determine what really is cognitive junk food, and what is genuinely nourishing. Instead of worrying about a show's violent or tawdry content, instead of agitating over wardrobe malfunctions or the f-word, the true test should be whether a given show engages or sedates the mind. Is it Least Objectionable Programming, or Most Repeatable Programming? Is it a single thread strung together with predictable punch lines every thirty seconds? Or does it map a complex social network? Is your onscreen character running around shooting everything in sight, or is she trying to solve problems and manage resources? If your kids want to watch reality TV, encourage them to watch
Survivor
over
Fear Factor.
If they want to watch a mystery show, encourage
24
over
Law & Order.
If they want to play a violent game, then encourage
Grand Theft Auto
over
Quake.
(Indeed, it might be just as helpful to have a rating system that uses mental labor and not obscenity and violence as its classification scheme for the world of mass culture.) For parents, if your selection principle is built around cognitive challenge, and not content, then you needn't limit your children's media intake to dutiful nightly exposure to Jim Lehrer and
NOVA
; the popular culture is supplying plenty of vigorous cognitive workouts on its own.

Where our media diets are concerned for all of us—young, old, or somewhere in the middle—the commonsense rule still applies: moderation in everything. However laudable
SimCity
is, if you've spent the last week locked in your study playing it, you should pick up a book for a change. (And preferably not a
SimCity
game guide.) But neither should we deny ourselves the occasional obsession. These are deep, rich worlds being created on our screens; you can't truly experience them—you can't probe their physics and telescope your way through their multiple objectives—without becoming a little obsessed in the process. Out of obsession comes expertise, a confidence in your own powers of analysis—a sense that if you stick with the system long enough, you'll truly figure out how it works.

Kids and grownups both can learn from those obsessions. In fact, one of the unique opportunities of this cultural moment lies precisely in the blurring of lines between kid and grownup culture: fifty-year-olds are devouring Harry Potter; the median age of the video game–playing audience is twenty-nine; meanwhile, the grade-schoolers are holding down two virtual jobs to make ends meet with a virtual family of six in
The Sims.
Most of the defining popular diversions of our time—Pixar movies,
The Lord of the Rings, Survivor—
possess genuine appeal for ten-year-olds, GenXers, and boomers alike. Writing in
The New Yorker
a few years ago, the writer Kurt Andersen adroitly described this trend:

Too often we imagine the blurring of kid and grownup culture as a series of violations: the nine-year-olds who have to have nipple rings explained to them thanks to Janet Jackson; the suburban teenagers reciting gangsta rap lyrics instead of the Pledge of Allegiance. But this demographic blur has a commendable side that we don't acknowledge enough. The kids are forced to think like grownups: analyzing complex social networks, managing resources, tracking subtle narrative intertwinings, recognizing long-term patterns. The grownups, in turn, get to learn from the kids: decoding each new technological wave, parsing the interfaces, and discovering the intellectual rewards of play. Parents should see this as an opportunity, not a crisis. Smart culture is no longer something you force your kids to ingest, like green vegetables. It's something you share.

 

I
HAVE ALMOST
no record of the dice-baseball games that I designed myself all those years ago: only a fragment of player cards from the '79 Yankees. But thanks to the infinite storage of eBay, I now have some of my favorite games from that stage of my life sitting beside me in my study: APBA, Strat-o-Matic, even Extra Innings. Every now and then I'll pull one of them out and flip through the player cards and charts. The encounter never fails to leave me in a strange sort of reverie. On the one hand, the colors and shapes—even the typefaces—of the games are all wonderfully familiar. But at the same time, a powerful distance has opened up between these games and my adult self. I once spent one entire evening scouring the Extra Innings binder, with its endless rows of data, trying to marshal all my intellectual powers to figure out how the game was actually played. I could have ploughed through the instructions, of course, but I wanted to do it the hard way, because I had once known the rules of this game as intimately as anything in my life—and besides, I was only ten years old at the time! How hard could it be? But the longer I looked at the charts, the more the game seemed like a cipher to me, like some kind of numerical programming language that I had never learned. And with that mystery came a kind of wonder: not that my ten-year-old self had been capable of learning this language—kids are capable of amazing feats of cognition, after all—but that I had possessed the dedication and stamina to master such a complex system, without anyone actually forcing me to learn it.