"everything bad is good for you: how today's popular culture is actually making us smarter." in it it the author writes games like "grand theft auto" to interpret complex patterns which developed the cognitive abilities of those playing the games. this event from 2005 is about an hour. .. >> good evening, everyone. i'm the community relations director here. we thank you for joining us for tonight's discussion. for years and even decades parents have sclamed to their children to get away from that tv, you spend too much time on the internet, and, of course, you'll get nothing out of life playing video games. could all of this parental wisdom be totally wrong? draw from fields as diverse as neuroscience, economics and literary theory tonight's guest, steven johnson, argues that the junk culture we are so

eager to dismiss is, in fact, making us more intelligent. after reading tonight's featured book, you may never complain or question the value of television, playstation or xbox ever again. steven johnson is the author of "the new york times" bestseller "mind wide open" and is the co-founder of the online magazine "feed." he also writes the emerging technology column for "discover" as well as contributing editor of "wired." here to discuss his new book titled "everything bad is good for you," please welcome steven johnson. >> yes. it's true. 15-year-olds all over the country are going to be sending me small bills and tchokes thank me for this book. thank you for coming out. and thank you, c-span audience,

for being here. i like the idea of people watching c-span who maybe turn it on and they're watching somebody do a filibuster and all of a sudden there's a guy talking about why video games are good for your brain. it's going to be quite a change. hopefully they'll enjoy it i'm not going to read. because i find particularly with nonfiction reading is the last thing people come to hear. so there are a couple of quick quotes and passages i'll read for entertainment value, maybe in funny accents or something like that. and i'll try to give you a walk-through of what the argument is in this book. and then we can open it up for discussion which there tends to be with this topic as you might imagine people feel very strongly. i've never written a book before on a topic about which people had had already formed strong opinions. they wrote a book about neuroscience, emergence, the subtitle which was "connected lives, ants, cities, brains and software." what i tell people about that,

they would say ants and what? node idea what i was talking about. where as this book instantly when i would describe it to people on an airplane or over coffee somewhere, they were ready to go. either agree organize disagreeing. but they had a lot of strong feelings about it. so it's fun to be here with a finished book ready to have people read it and respond. we did an exerpt of the television section that ran in the "new york times" magazine about three weeks ago. so that sent off -- the internet went crazy with that. so it's a weird point where there's this whole existing debate about the book that seems to be going on online and the blogs. most people haven't read it because it only came out on thursday or friday. so there's a high ratio of discussion, the actual reading of the book right now which hopefully some of you will help balance out by reading it. i want to talk a little bit about how i came to write it and then walk through the argument. basically to give you the argument in a nutshell bring

backtrack a little bit, i'm trying to intervene in the debate we've been having about the state of popular culture. which over the last few years has kind of erupted into the discussion about janet jackson and the super bowl and rap music and the "sopranos" and violence and the f.c.c. crack down on obscenity. it feels to me a little bit like right now the state of the debate ises -- there's two sides. one side thinks the pop culture is so bad that the federal government needs to intervene to clean things up. the other side just thinks that it's really, really bad. you know, that's the powlart we have. what i'm trying to do in this book is to say, yes, there may be legitimate questions to ask about the role of violence in popular media and some of us may feel there's too much sex or too much obscenity. but that's not the whole story. and in fact, if you look at pop culture from another angle, the angle that i try and describe in the book, if you look at it in terms of the kind of mental

work you have to do to make sense of a television show or video game ordeal with interactive media, the kind of problem solving you have to do, the amount of focus and patience and intellectal exercise you have to work through that on average over the last 30 years the popular culture has grown more complicated not less complicated. and i call that trend over the last 30 years the sleeper curve. after this great classic scene that some of you may know from "sleeper" which involves woody allen playing this kind of health food store owner from the 1970's who suddenly jumps forward 200 years and wakes up and it's 2173 and all of the scientists are analyzing him are confused because he keeps asking for tigers milk and organic wheat germ and things like that. they said why is he asking for this? they said, those were the charmed substances that were once thought to contain life preserving properties. and then they said, he doesn't want hot fudge or cheeseburgers

or all the things we now know that are really good for you? and so basically the concede is all the things that were supposed to be so much junk food, when you look at that time from this angle which i hope to persuade you of, end up turning out to be more nourishing than we thought so that's the sleeper curve, the argument of "everything bad is good for you." i just want to backtrack and talk about something i've never talked about before but it's one of my favorite parts of the book which comes at the beginning. this kind of memory that i have of being 9 years old. and going through this extremely object yes, sirive phase in my life. i'm from d.c. my parents are here so they can testify to how crazy this phase was in my life. where i got extremely into these dice baseball games. does anybody remember these things? they were before computer games that you didn't have computers, you didn't have p.c.'s it was a bit like dungeons and dragons for those of you who lost years playing "dungeons

and dragons" except you were dying sports simulation. the idea was somebody had come up with mathematical models of all the baseball players out there. this is what video games, baseball games do behind the scenes now. would you pick out your lineup and decide the strategy, who was going pitch for you and whether you were going to bunt when you had somebody on first base and if you were going to put in a substitute player. then you would role three dice or something like that. and consult some charts and figure out based on the players and their statisticsed what happened. there was this groundout to first base or a single to left field or the runner scored or got thrown out. but it sounds kind of in the abstract like something could you imagine a 9-year-old being into. 9-year-olds like baseball and who wouldn't want to manage a team? but the games turned out to be incredibly complicated. and the first one i played was the game called apba baseball which was the simplest of the bunch. i went on this jag over about two or three years where i

started to seek out ever more complicated games that would more mathematically, accurately model the game of baseball. and eventually i got so hooked that i started designing my own because the existing games weren't accurate enough. and i don't think i had as many friends during that period as i might have if i had not been in my room playing these games all the time. but i went back thanks to ebay a few years ago as i was starting to prepare for this book. and i ordered all of these games online. i hadn't seen them for over 20 years. and it was just amazing. kind of sense memory getting these things in the mail. you opened them up. they kind of smelled like 1979 in addition to bringing back all of these memories. i started looking through them and realized that they were incredibly complicated. in terms of what you actually had to do as a 9 or 10-year-old to kind of figure out whether it was a single to left field or the runner was thrown out at first so in the book i talk about this experience. then i quote from just briefly

-- if this sounds mind-numbingly boring to hear read, that's the point. this is from the chart of the simplest of the games. right? so if you -- this is the instruction if you were pitching with the bases empty. this is a little exerpt of the guide for how you figured out what the correct result was in the game. "the hitting numbers under which lines appear may be altered according to the grade of the pitcher against whom the team is batting. always observe the grade of the pitcher and look for possible changes of those numbers which are underlined. no change always refers back to the d or left column and always means a base hit. against grade d pitchers there is never any change. theland column only if used when a pitcher is withdrawn from the game, make node note of the grade of the pitcher. a different column must be referred to. certain players may have the numbers, seven, eight or 11 in the second columns of their cards when any of these numbers is found in the second column of the player card, it is not subject to normal grade changes. always use the left grade d-column in these cases no

matter what the pitcher's grade is. occasionally pitchers may have a, c or a and b. consider these pitchers as grade a pitchers unless the a column has to be the base hit. then use the c or b column for the final play result." there's literally 25 pages of this stuff that you have to read and memmierize to play the game without sitting there consulting. and, you know, might as well be the little small writing in the back of a 1040 form. it's incredibly complex stuff. there i was at 10 sitting there . i had memmierize it so much that i knew, of course, a grade c pitcher you look at theland column. it's obvious that's what you do. why wouldn't anybody do that? so i look back at that time and think about this amazing amount of mastery i had of what was essentially a meaningless system. i wasn't learning life lessons from it really. there was no, you know, moral to the story. i wasn't learning anything that was directly useful or

applicable in my subsequent professional life. did i not go on to become a dice baseball player or even a real baseball player or management thankfully for the sport of baseball. i'm convinced that that period of three years i was learning as much as i was learn from anything that i was getting in school. because i was look at the little complex system of baseball and trying to figure out what its component parts are, how it works, what's the best way to model that system, what's the best way to gauge whether your models are accurate or not, tweaking the models, learning new systems on the fly, exercising the mind, doing the math of dealing with all the computations of these player cards and everything. it was a mental workout. really not unlike the mental workout you get when you play chess. we don't get life lessons from chess. the plot of chess is simplistic it always ends the same way. there's no useful historical knowledge imparted to you about the world from chess. but most of us agree that playing chess is kind of good,

exercises the minds, skills causal relations and so on. so i thought playing those games that i was getting the same kind of exercise in a slight index form. and what i now have come to believe is that that kind of thinking which was maybe a marginal bordering on mainstream child pursuit at that point, because there were a lot of people playing dungeons and dragons. there were a lot of people playing dice based military simulations. but it was not something that was necessarily a mainstream megahit kind of part of the culture. that kind of thinking has become much more mainstream. thanks to the proliferation of things like video games and interactive media. when you sit down in a sense with a new piece of software -- and we all know how complex today's software can be -- and you look at that system and you learn its rules on the fly just by exploring the system and experimenting with it and tinkering and building models of cause and effect as to what

clicking on this does you are exercising those same kinds of fluid, on the spot problem solving skills that i was exercising playing these games. 25 years ago or so. the example that brought things home to me that started me in a way on this journey was a few years ago i was on a vacation with these nephews of mine. ed a 7-year-old nephew at the time. i decided to show him the video game "sin city." this was an earlier version of "sin city" that had come out. i think it's the second to last version. for those of you who haven't seen it you play a virtual robert moses and build your own city. a huge me tropluss on the screen. you control everything from zoning industrial areas to zoning out residential or building highways or putting in the infrastructure. basically the beautiful thing about the game is you don't totally have control over everything. they simes call these god games because you look down on the world and get to manipulate things. but what makes them interesting is the lack of control.

you create a highway. you zone it for residential. you build a power plant. you put the infrastructure in place if you've done everything right, people start to move in to your neighborhoods that you've built on the screen. and suddenly you'll see little cars moving around on the screen and then little house as peer and then a factory will be built. suddenly you'll have a little this rifing town. if do you things right, and give them access to schools and parks, more people will come. suddenly you'll have a little village. suddenly you'll have a city. you'll grow this organically on the screen. it's a magical game. also, by the way, one of the best-selling games of all time of there's no violence in this game. it's a wonderful learning experience. it also happens to be hugely fun. so i've been playing this game since the first game in and out 1993, the original version which was not terribly complicated but it has grown into this complicated thing. i was showing my nephew who was 7 years old. thought, this will be fun. the graphics are cool for this. so i'll take them on a little tour of my city. and i basically took them around like i was kind of a tour guide just showing them

the landmarks. this is my mayor's house that i built for myself looking out over the walter there. over here is where we have a big park. and that is a nice neighborhood where there are a lot of shops. like that neighborhood. so i showed them the game for about 2025, minutes. and then i got to this one area that was this rundown industrial area where all of these factories had never really taken off and there was a lot of crime. and i was trying to deal with the crime. this was taking up a lot of my time. so i said to him, you know, i'm having trouble with this area. i'm having this crime problem in this industrial area. i captain seem to get it work. he looked at me and said, i think you need to lower your industrial tax rates. i said in fact, that is right. i probably do it's for a development. but wait a second, you're 7. where did you get this? i had not explained that much about the internal dynamics of the game. but in watching me talk about it and working with the assumption that he had as a 7-year-old living in this culture, that this is an interactive thing and you can mess with things and change the variables and experiment and

learn from your experiments, he was already picking up this idea of lowering industrial tax rates. he had basically picked up something. if you put him down in an urban studies classroom at the age of 7, he would be asleep in three seconds or crawling out windows. but somehow in this kind of game world he quickly kind of grasped the idea of how the system works and was ready to kind of get in there and get his hands dirty. he was ready to experiment. so that's a very powerful mental cocktail when you're in that kind of world, you're really doing things that i think are enriching even if the subject matter isn't quite as laud trias building a city. so i'll talk a little bit about what those kind of mental attributes are in a second. but the first thing i want to do at this point is dislodge some biases many of you may have about the importance of reading over game plans. most of us still have this assumption which i think is partially true that kids are

always better reading a book than they are playing a game. and that there's something just reward and intellectally tax and rigorous about reading, slipping into my argument about reading that will never really be challenged by the act of game playing. 10 early in the book i offered this kind of thought experiment to you after quoting a bunch of people, including dr. spock in his baby guide, the late dr. spock who says "the one thing that can be said about video games is they are almost always a pleat waste of time," you must teach your children to love reading, reading is important interlebletlectally and games are useless. i ask to you imagine this thought experiment. what if games had come first? what if people had been play and absorbing and interact well video games for 300, 400 years and then all of a sudden books were invent and the kids were into the books and the older generation who had grown up

playing video games would look at these kids today with their books what would be the kind of angry, upset, discouraging emails and op-eds and blog posts written by the older generation about these new books that all the kids were into? so i wrote a little mock op-ed here. i'll read it to you. it's very tempting to read this in a william f. buckley fake british accent. i'll try not to. "reading books chronically understimulates the senses. unlike the long standing tradition of game playing which engages the child in a vivid three dimensional world filled with moving images and musical sound scapes navigated and controlled with complex muscular movements, books are simply a baron string of words on the page. only a small portion of the brain devoted to processing written language is activated during reading while games engage the full range of the sensory and motors ". i like reading this aloud in a

bookstore. people who don't get the context will be hearing this, they should get another author. books are also tragically isolating. games have for many years engage the young and complex social relationships for their peers build and exploring worlds together. books force the child to sequester him or herself in a quiet space, shut off from interaction with other children. these new lie blares -- libraries that have arisen to facilitate reading activities are a frightening site. dozens of normal children vivacious and interactive sit alone in cubicles reading silently, oblivious to their peers. many children enjoy reading books, of course, and no doubt some of the flights of fancy conveyed by read having their escapist merits. but for a sizeable percentage of the population, books are down right discriminatory. the reading craze of recent years cruelly taunts the americans who suffer from dislexia, a condition that didn't even exist as a

condition until printed text came along to stigmatize its sufferers. but perhaps the most dangerous property of these books is the fact that they follow a fixed linear path. you captain control the nartives in any fashion. you simply sit back and have the story dictated to you. for those of us raised on interactive nartives this property may seem astonishing. why would anyone want to embark on an adventure utterly choreographed by another person? but today's generation embarks on such adventures millions of times a day. this risks instilling a general passivity in our children making them feel as though their power powerless to change their circumstances. reading is not an active participatory process, it is a smissive one. the book readers of the younger generation are learning to follow the plot instead of learning to lead. now, i put this up object my website. after about six hours of it being up there i had to stop and go back and put a disclaimer before it appeared

saying, "warning, what follows is satire ", i do not believe these things about books in case you noticed, i write books for a living. i would not be able to do any of the things i do in books without the book format. i would never attempt make the argument of this book in a video game, for instance. " hopefully it gives you a little bit a sense of what the discussion of video games sounds like to somebody who's played them when it's coming from somebody who clearly hasn't or in the case of many people, people who last played a video game when pacman was all the rage. what is the game experience like? let me explain a couple of things about it. the first thing that has to be said about gaming that is crucial and that is not discussed nearly enough is that most video games today are incredibly sometimes frustratingly difficult. they take an immense amount of patience, shockingly. when you sit down and play these games, most lit rules are not explained to you. you are dropped into a world and you have only a basic sense of what you can do. and you don't even know what your ultimate objective is. you have to explore the world

and learn as you play. you have to learn the rules of the game as you are playing the game. imagine if somebody set you down at a chess board and said, ok, start playing. we'll give you feedback if play correctly but we're not going tell what you the rules are for the piece. chess is hard enough without that. but if you had an extra lay are of i have to learn how to play while i'm playing, you get some sense of what the complexity is like. first off, they're difficult. the whole idea that kids today like to go with the cheapest, easiest, lowest common denominator pleasure is completely contradicted by the experience of gaming. if our brains really wanted to be attracted to the cheapest pleasure and the most instant gratification, then the history of game design would be the history people competing to make the easiest game on the market. in fact, people compete to make the hardest games and the games have consistently gotten more and more difficult because people like to be challenged. there's pleasure in being challenged. particularly when you have an interactive form that can reward success when you finally achieve it. it's a very intoxicating mix to

people. a second point about these games. they involve at every point decision making. at every single moment in a game you're sitting there evaluating what's in front of you, evaluating what's happened in the past, evaluating the decision that you've made and the objective that enough front of you. and based on that mix of information you are making a snap decision about what to do next. whether it's explore this way, whether it's sometimes shoot agent something, whether it's building industrial zoning areas, or whether it's doing any number of things that these games can do. you're making decisions at every turn. whatever else you say about the merits of reading, whatever else you might say about the merits of television, whatever else you might say about the merits of film rg on some basic level do you not make decisions when you read or you watch a movie or you watch a television show. you know, you use your imagination in ways -- a book -- i'll say it a million times, books are fantastic novels, incredible things, nonfiction, popular nonsfiction a wonderful

thing. all of these things are great. but don't make active decisions when you're reading something. you are on some level following somebody else's decision that they've made in crafting the book for you. in games, the idea of decision making is not a metaphor. it's an active thing you are doing. there is no more i think elemental component of intelligence in your ability to assess what's in front of you, all the variables going on and make the decision about the proper course to follow. that's a core component of what it means to be smart. games are exercising that in a way that all media up to this point has not even come close to. two other points about it there is something i call in the book probing. probing is this process where you're look at the system and trying to figure out in a sense these rules. you're trying to figure out the physics of the world. if i jump here, will i land on the other side or fall down in the ravine. you're trying to figure out what the other characters are doing what their relationships are to you, what secrets they may have, where the puzzles are you do that basically by this method of going into the world, zphroring around, building a

hypothesis about how one part of the world works, trying that hypothesis out if it works, proceeding with that is an accepted idea if it doesn't work, trying again and work another idea. in other words, what the gamers are doing is what we also call the scientific method. they're constantly probing this world looking for kind of working hypotheses about how the world works and building on those ideas if they turn out to be fruitful. and if they don't, they try it again. again, that's something you don't do in a book for all the virtues of reading. and finally, there's something i call telescopic thinking which is in a game the best way to capture this is to freeze somebody in the middle of a complicated game. in the bike fwake game called zelledia, played by 8-year-olds and 38-year-olds and everybody in between. and it it's a kind of classic rescue, the princess story where you have to go on a mission and you go through these tests. and if you freeze somebody kind of 20 hours ny agame basically that takes about 40 hours to

play, and ask them what are your objectives, what are you working on in your mind, what are you thinking your goals are at this point? what you'll end up getting -- i can just kind of show it to you. if you have the book in front of you, it's on page 52. but i summarized basically about half of the kind of active objectives in your head. at one point in about hour 20 in the game zelda. it sounds like this. to locate the items you need the pearl of din from the eye learneds to get this you need to help them solve their problem to do this you need the chair of the prince. get a letter from the girl. find the girl in the village. once get the letter to the prince you must bee friend the prince to do this you need to get to the top of dragian roost mountain to do this you must get to the other side of the gheorghe, etc., erkts eliminates. goes on. then if i had printed whole thing it would have gone on equally that long for another two pages or so. that's just a snapshot of

basically an hour's worth of play. what's important about this is that it's nested. so you can't just do anything you want. you have objectives. but certain objectives are more important than others and certain objectives have to be played in and out order and see crens. but you don't know what the sequence is. you have to figure tout. then figure out what the priorities are. and then start executing these objectives as you're playing. so what you have to do is have what i described is kind of a telescopic way of thinking where you have to have a long distance view but the objectives collapse in on themselves so that you have this nested way of thinking, well, i have to do this first but then i'll do that once i've done those two things, i'll be able to do this other thing which will lead plea to my goal which is this which will then start a new adventure in the next hour of this game. now, that, by the way, is how we think all the time in real life. right? this is what we think about when we're sit teg office. we think, ok, i have to write this memo, short-term so i can get this thing out the door so that we can close down that project so that i can get that raise to so that i can buy that new house so that i can be happy.

or whatever the list is in your head. it's that kind of nested, telescopic thinking that's crucial to just being successful and being smart and engaged in the world. video games again are exercising that kind of power. they're doing it in a way that's fanciful and made up of cartoon characters and the content isn't that interesting of the games. but the mental work is just as the content of chess isn't all that interesting. the content of calculus on some level isn't that interesting. but we accept the idea that it's good for kids in school to exercise their mind by doing calculus even though we agree that all of us agree the 99% of the kids who learn calculus will never use it in any clear direct way when they become grownups. but there's something good about that kind of exercise that we value. so that's what they're get from games. now, let me move object a little bit and talk about the television section and briefly touch ony think this is happening then open it up for you to shoot down my theory and cause me to crawl mom and -- crawl home and cry myself to

sleep. it's funny. people have two different responses. some people are shocked and appalled that would i defend video games. but do admit that television seems to be getting smarter. then some people are buy the video game's argument but shocked and appall i had would ever defend television so i'm offending everybody in slight index ways. it's a good sign with television what i think is happening is not so much that the television shows today are really driving the kind of sharpening of the mind that i think the interactive media, the games are. in a sense, it's playing catch up. what they've learned is that there are all of these kids out there who have grown up playing these games and have come to expect that their entertainment will challenge them. mentally. and so when you sit those kids down in front of "three's company" or "laverne & sher shirley," they're going to be bored because they inspect more intrigue, more challenge, more kind of mental juggling that you have to do as part of their entertainment.

so what i try to look at in the book was the history of last 30 years, viewed from the same angle of how much work do you have to do to make sense of your average television show? i looked at different factors. first is this property of multiple narrative lines. how much has television changed in terms. number of plots that your average episode will throw at you? in the old days of tv basically would you have one episode equals pretty much one plot with maybe one minor subplot. so you would sit down for your 30 minutes or your hour and you would be focused on one major question. been a burglary who did it. we have to figure tout. there's a crime scene. we have to solve the mystery. and that's what we're focused on. and then in 1981, with some precedent, soap operas and a few other things that the book gets into, a show came out. most you probably remember it "hill street blues," first mainstream kind of serious

drama on network television to do really fully multithreaded, as they call it narrative where they would be five or six, sometimes even more separate nartives woven through an episode. i actually have little charts in the book that show you visually what it looks like. "hill street" came out and it was too difficult for the audience of today to understand it. this is an absolute proven fact. they ran a pilot. everybody complained. it was too complicated. it went on the air. it had incredible reviews. it was in a great position on network -- on nbc's prime-time schedule. they did move it around a little bit. and despite all of that great press, it finished i think 71 oust 73 in the nielsens for the year when it was very close to dead last and everybody was complaining that we just can't follow all of these plots. our brains just get distracted by all of these different interactions. we prefer the show where's there's one thing going on because it's too hard to keep track of these things.

fast forward 25 years or so. there's a whole host shows. everything from sopranos to the wire and six feet under on had been thob "alias," to "24". apparently to "desperate housewives." apparently it has this threading as well. to the reality shows which are "survivor" and "the apprentice" have multiple lines of interactions between the different characters. you often have 15 characters interacting in many different ways. awful these shows are much more complicated than "hill street blues" was. and are more in other ways in the sense that they're constantly referencing things that happened -- an episode of "sopranos" will make a reference to something that happened five episodes ago without doing hand holding. they won't have flash backs. they'll assume you're pay attention and can remember. so all of these shows are significantly more complicated than "hill street" was and yet they are all nielsen top 20 shows.

"sopranos," is a huge hit, regularly outdraws the networks. so something has had happened in our mind over those 25 years that we've gone from being a nation of people who say i can't follow all of these plots , i'm shorting out here. to our being much more comfortable with that and more comfortable being challenged by these multiple plots. another one is social networks which is kind of a flip side of the same kind of argument. this came out of my last book, "mind wide open" its ability to teach you about yourselves and your own lives. one thing it's explained to us is that our ability to map social networks of people is one of our greatinate strengths as human beings. we have dedicated circuit triin our brains that is very good at keeping networks and social groups alive in our heads and keeping track of all the kind of soap opera questions of who's getting along with who and who's not, who's feuding with who, who your allies are,

who's manipulating who. in that kind of social intelligence, we know if you've ever read a book like emotional intelligence, you know that that social intelligence is hugely predictive of your real world success. you know, as predictive as your abilities to score well in the s.a.t.'s. when you go into the office environment, when you're working through academia, or you're trying to do anything professionally where you're dealing with large groups of people and your performance is related to your ability to manage those relationships, if you have social i.q., if you are good at mapping social networks and keeping track of the different relationships around you, you will perform much better in that environment. that's a real form of intelligence that we've only begun to appreciate through some of the recent cognitive science research into emotion. now, what i'm argue is that another trend that you can see as part of the sleeper curve is the trend towards increased social -- dramatic trend towards increased social network complexity in television shows so again, you

can almost see this from far away. if you have the book -- i feel like i'm teaching a class now. everybody turn page -- this is the technique i have to get people to pick up the book and have it in their shooneds they're more likely to buy it later. on page 110, those of you who can see it this is a map of the social network of an episode of "dallas "froy 1978. it's episode eight from season one. it's basically about 10 characters. the little lines connecting them are showing you these are relation shups need to understand to make sense of the episode. so you have to understand that bobby and j.r. are brothers, for instance. that's the basic relationship. in this episode you have to understand they're feuding over which one is going have a baby first and please the family patriarch. i've outlined -- there are like four major relationships central to the plot. then there about 10 or 12 that are peripheral but are useful in energy the narrative. now, this is a social network

that you need to keep track in your head to understand a single episode of the show "24," the very much hit show "24." there are 31 i think characters in this episode. and many many multiple lines of connection between them that you have to chart in your head. there are more lines because it's a mole plot where you're worried about who the mole is in the intelligence unit so you're constantly thinking about relationships that the show hasn't spelled out specifically. you're like is that person the mole? maybe that person's the mole. are they related to this other person? i don't know. it's even more complicated than that. it's about three times as complex a network. this is something that we sit down and watch happily every day. we eat it up. we think it's challenging and interesting. it's grown that much more complicated. and social network napping is impeerically an important part of being a smart person. on some level i'm arguing you are exercising your social network mapping skills when you choose to watch a show like 24 rather than a show like dallas. now, you can absolutely

exercise your social network mapping skills by reading a complex social network representative in the form of a novel as well. i'm talking about the comparative trends in society. and 30 years ago we were all watching dallas. now we're all watching 24. and 24 is much richer an more challenging in this particular respect. i'll save the reality tv stuff. but if people want to ask me about that, that's one of the things people feel strongly about. let me move on. and conclude by saying a couple things about why i think this is happening. then we can open it up to questions. the first thing that's important to debunk, i think with this is the idea that i alluded to earlier that we all have intrinsically slacker brains. that we really want on some level the cheapest pleasure, the most instant gratification. and then we seek out things that won't challenge us. i believe that's wrong. i believe the reason why for

some part of the history of the 20th century pop culture we were drawn towards kind of cheap pleasures because the technology was pushing us in that way less our own april tights. there's a great quote here from an nbc executive, paul klein who was describing the philosophy -- did i say nbc or snabs nbc. he was describing the philosophy at nbc in the late 1970's. kind of the made year of television programming. he was talking about what happens when you have three big networks and people don't have choices, don't have the internet, don't have video games. they can read a book or watch television. there are only three or four things on at any given time and there's no way to pause or rewind or do anything else. we don't have v.c.r.'s at that point. so basically the networks at that point had people captive if they were going to watch something, they basically had very few options.

so they developed a philosophy that this guy paul klein dubbeded the theory of least objectionable programming. he was saying somebody who put stuff on the air that what he was trying to do was make sure whatever he was putting on was the least objectionable and that would keep him at his 30% share of the market. so this is a quote from a speech that he gave. this is an amazingly evil speech i think. we all start equally, all three networks. then we can add to that by our competitors' failure. they become objectionable so people turn to us if we're less objectionable. or we could lose audience by inserting little tricks that cause the loss of an audience. thought that's tune out. education. tune out. definitely tune out. mello drama is good. a little tear here and there, a little morality tale. that's good positive. least objectionable. it's my job to keep my 32% not cause any tuneout a priority in terms of ads or concepts. to make sure there's no tuneout

in the shows vis-a-vis the competition. i like the vis-a-vis. the idea of let's just not offend anybody and we'll stay where we are and that will be good let's not challenge anybody's brain at all. compare that to what's happened. and this sketch to the second that i think is driving the sleeper curve. that is that almost all the technologies of the media that have pro live rated so much in the last 30 years, you think of the things we've add, almost all of them have been in one form or another technologies of repetition that enable to you stop and rewind and watch something again or watch a whole episode and then watch it again. starting with the v.c.r. you can either watch the movie and rewind it and watch it again or you can tape things on tv and pause it or watch it later, watch it six times if you wanted. then we had d.v.d.'s come along and could you buy a movie and watch it 17 times if you wanted and suddenly television shows were coming out. you could watch a whole season even though you left it behind many years ago on the networks. syndication, even before that,

became a huge money maker in the business. so the seinfeld creators made their vast fortunes not from actual lit first run of their shows but from the after market deals when they sold their shows into indication so that they would live on forever in the cable universe. that's where the money was. then you have things like tivo and video on demand and even people now downloading television show and sharing them illegally on internet. all of these things enable to you watch things multiple times if they're at all challenging, you can pause, rewind, figure out more about them. what they do is they create an economic incentive in the market to create programming that improves on repeat viewings. and that is a fundamental shift from that era of least objectionable programming. i call it most repeatable programming. the shows that prosper in this environment are the show that don't get incredibly annoying and dull the third time you see them. "seinfeld" and the "simpsons"

ruled the indication airwaves partially because you can watch it four times and still catch new things. there are a million little subtle reference that go on in that show that you can watch a episode you've already seen three times and, oh, god, i never got the friday the 13th reference there or that's a "citizens cane" thing or that's a reference to the first season episode. so the economic model encourages complexity. it encourages challenge. it encourages all the things that paul klein thought were a threat to his marketshare back in 1980. and the final thing that i'll add to that mix is the effect that the internet has had on these shows. if you go to the online kind of fan sites and discussion forms for any of these hypercomplex shows, if you see "sopranos" fan site or the "24" fan seist or "lost" the show now that's such a rage, you'll find thousands and thousand of virtual pages of people with every little moment of these show and complaining --

explaining why this character did this. and basically because that realm of commentary is available now, the shows can get more complicated. because they know that if their audience gets lost, they cannot only see it again, but they can also go back and look online and figure out that's why that guy killed that guy in scene two. i didn't understand what that was. now it makes sense to me. so there's a whole support network for the new complexity of the media because the internet has created these forms. all of those things create a kind of a positive feedback where suddenly their rewards -- people get used to the shows being more complicated. they come to expect that rather than your average tony danza sitcome that we've been trained on that i grew up on. and you end up getting this rise and curve towards more complexity. that's the storist sleeper curve. that's the story that i try and tell in the book. and that's what i hope you'll get to read if you get a chance to read the book. thank you for listening to me.

i think we have five, 10 minutes? >> about 10 minutes. let's go ahead and fire some questions at steven. who wants to be first? >> thank you very much. your thesis certainly is an excellent prescription for preventing boredom, exercising the mind. it's consistent with the american yling -- ideology of trying to enjoy every moment as one of complete novelty. americans have a very short attention span. so what you're exercising is your intelligence an your imagination. but unfortunately on the negative side it would appear that memory is being knee -- neglected. the advantage of reading is that you can memmierize what

you read. then you reflect upon it which is a hallmark of philosophy. and you can make a decision whether to accept or reject whatever you read. but it's also consistent with human evolutionary theory that we are evolving toward greater degrees of complexity, especially within the brain. >> thank you. that's a great point. i agree with what you're saying. let me say a couple -- let me explain why i agree with it because it might contradict some some way what's i've been arguing. a very specific tactical thing i'm trying to do with this book, which is to engage in the debate that's happening right now and point out what i see as a very clear, positive thing that is happening.

because there's very little talk about any positive thing happening. so it may well be that as a society or as individuals we decide that i'm right and that we are getting these kind of problem solving upgrades in our ability to do this kind of fluid intelligence is in fact, improving thanks to the popular culture but that it's still not entirely made up for the fact that we're losing the kind of historical thinking, the fill soffical thinking or in another argument that the morality is so bad or the violence is so bad that it's not making up for the fact that we're getting these cognitive upgrades in the way that i'm describing the book. if that's the case, that's fine. i don't necessarily think that i agree with that argument. think on the whole things are getting better on average. but i'll accept somebody who looks at it honestly and says, yes, you're right. but there these other costs and we have to factor those in i'm happy with that. state of the debate now is we're all just getting stupidder. everything is getting dumbed down. the television has never been

more crude and the video games are a total waste of time. i'm trying to do something tactical. that does mean emphasizing certain things over others as i'm sure you know. you write books and kind of focus ways. you're trying to emphasize a certain point. i personally -- my background -- i spent five years all but dissertation in english literature in grad school. i spent the time leading up to my orls reading about 75, 80, 19th century novels. the time i spent living in that world was one of the most richest experiences of my life. it is a kind of cultural experience that you will never get out of a video game. so i sense the loss that comes from those types of experiences becoming less dominant in the society. the flip side is that people still do read novels. it's not as if these older forms are completely going away. it's just the balance, the ratio is changing so much.

so maybe the thing to do is to focus as a society and in our education system or as parents and recognize, well, our kids are getting quite smart in terms of problem solve and the things that might show up on an i.q. test. we need to emphasize these other things because that's what they're not getting. that's the kind of balancing act we need to do. >> look at these graves of the complexity of plot structures and so forth and listening to your comments about complexity, i note that there's -- a comment you made earlier, there's a contradiction in this basic scheme that i think shows a central flaw this your argument which is the tradeoff between formal mental operations and content, you, yourself, admitted that tradeoff. and the fact matter is that it really doesn't matter how complex these plots have become, how much information we can keep track of.

because basically it is still crap. the characters are bad. the ideas are bad. the concepts are shallow. and it's complexity without meaning, without content or depth. actually if you look at television, although i think some of the more recent shows have been good ones, "seinfeld" and "simpsons" are about two of the only three or four decent things in the bast 20 years, i think we've lost quite a bit. if you look at the show that i grew up in the early 1960's for all the limitations of sensorship, some of them are much better written and acting was better and drama was better. the best written show of all time was "route 66 "out most literate and had the most emotional depth and character development why is that sth? because the people in those days did not grow up watching television and then they grew up reading books. they had real life experiences. when you have the experience both leading real life and you have the experience of literacy and reflection, you have depth and you have content.

if you only grow up watching tv and then you get a degree in media study and think you have something to say about anything , you're going to show how shallow and pointless your life and your mind actually is. so i find your argument has a fundamental flaw in it. it is the increase in our ability to process formal operations, basically does nothing to counteryarktyact the lack of critical ability, the lack of criticizing the society in which we live and the assumptions under which we live and develop critical thought and develop ourselves. historically that has only been done by one method which is the development of lit rassies. that's what's lifted people out of profert and hopelessness and other things and given people the capacity to reflect on their lives. literacy and not just this other stuff. >> it's a lot of things to respond to. i would say first off -- would i challenge awfully you to go back and look at the programs that were on the air not in the

kind of early golden age of television of the 1950's and the early 1960's when it was really kind of broadway mentality and when it was targeting a much smaller audience and really look at the programs from 1965 to 1985. and look at the audience and go back and watch nick at night and not just look at "all in the family" or "mary tyler moore." my personal feeling and the belief of a lot of television critics who spent time dealing with content, a lot of people just flat out disagree with what you're saying and believe there has been n -- in fact, a height in complexity like "e.r.," "the west wing" that was never visible in those shows. the shows have gotten more cinematic and complex in their story telling. these are story that go on for 100 hours if you look at them over the course of their multiple seasons. it's a story telling form that chip mcgrath, the old "new york

times" book review editor compared to basically saying this is our kind of modern serial triple dicker novel based on the 19th century and that there is the kind of depth that you claim is not there. as far as literacy , i absolutely believe in the importance of literacy . i have nothing to complain about that. i just think that media lit rassry is an important part of functioning in this world and offers many opportunities that traditional literacy can only partially get to. you don't get decision making from traditional literacy in the same way. there is very little evidence that we are losing our critical faculties. our s.a.t. scores are up both math and verbal, i.q. scores are dramatically up. the society has never been less violent. the generation raised on television and video games is creating. you've never seen more 20-somethings central to the u.s. economy than you have with the creations of companies like yahoo and amazon and so forth like that so the overall health of the generation raised on

these things, i don't see any evidence that there is a problem to be worried about. in fact, you find they have a lot of rewards that haven't been acknowledged because we don't have the language yet to describe them so i respectfully disagree. >> fibbing just follow up on the first two people. the first question relates to imagination. i believe that when you read a book, particularly a good novel, you're actually creating the pictures in your head, the characters. the second is when you play video games, a lot of attention is made to the speed of the decision rather than the thoughtfulness of the decision. we now have a generation that make wrong decisions quickly. and if it's right, it's good luck if it isn't, it isn't. i think the last -- i sometimes think the most important point of all is if you've mentioned the s.a.t.'s in the new s.a.t. is now necessary to teach people thousand write essays because that now taken off this now becomes a new art. an art which would never have been new had it been retained

instead of being a multiple choice alternative. >> right. let me make it clear again. i think particularly imagine stion a wonderful faculty. do you get it from reading. i fully support the continuing of books being read. but i guess i disagree and i would stress again that there is a faulty stereotype about the speed of decision making in the game world and this idea which was brought up before this idea that we're all moving towards these kind of instant snap judgments and this accelerated pace. in fact, the game-playing rhythm for many of these games is quite slow. the thinking process that you have to have is i think to think for 20 hours and think about what the consequences are in it this world 20 hours from now and what this will mean in this particular world. and i have to balance all of those things in my head.

not it's coming here and i have to shoot. that's the stereotype. most of the games are about longer chains of causal reelingsships. so there is a lot more patience involved. there's a lot of patience. think of the higher end of the kind of thinking that do you in a video game, programming. that's another faculty of something that is much more common. there are many more teenage computer programmers than there were 20, 30 years ago. in fact, the logic of games is for obvious reasons connected to the logic of computer programming. and computer programming takes an immense amount of patience, logic skills and an immense. along-term thinking. i've got a local objective but have to think about the macroneeds of the program. so that's the kind of thinking that i think is being encouraged in this society. it's not again the only kind of thinking. but it's one that has real world value and politicability. if you can use schools to then teach people to write essays, writing a lot more than they

used to because of email and internet. but teach them to write essays and give this will a sense of history in the school. you can take these fabulous logical skills and combine them with traditional education and you've got a great cocktail. but right now nobody's even acknologying -- acknowledging the logic skills. >> coming from that generation, i have a quick question. one in response to the other question. have you ever heard a final fantasy? >> mm-hmm. >> i like to read a lot. so i read specific of the russian authors i also like philosophy a lot. since i don't have tv, i can't respond to the whole tv question. but i can respond to the movie because i like movies and video games. the most -- one of the most recent fantasies deals a lot with bodelaire's sort of dream state versus nonstate versus what is reality versus not reality.

and all these writers all deal with that, too. my question for you, however, is -- i mean it seems yes they are become more complicated and things of that sort. but you have movies like the "matrix," at fliferte one. then you have this movie "crash" which deals a lot with emotions and things of that sort and gets more real and gritty. my question is i've noticed also in literature more recently that you have more ideas and less description of scenes. like specifically focusing on like descriptions. it's more focused on ideas and plot movements and things of that sort. i was just wondering if you had seen something kind of similar. >> tell me again what you're seeing the shift from ideas? >> i've seen shift to ideas from descriptions. like when i'm reading things of that sort, you see a lot more description on scenes. it's moving in that direction.

but it's still moving in some of the ideas. but you have a lot of description of scenes, rooms, things like that. versus now i'm reading the new author who wrote -- i can't remember the guy's name. >> anyway. so you're saying it's a move away from the description of the world towards the life of the mind? internal model and things like that? that's interesting. i haven't noticed that. there's a tradition -- if that's happening it's interesting because it's repeating a sense of a tradition of a shift that happened around the turn of the suntry with the rifes modernism where there was a movement of the interior landscape of the subject and their appraisal of the outside world. you had henry james. you had stream of consciousness. you moved with a from -- dickens, for instance, elliott, are all much more about the external actions of characters

and their effect on the world. you rarely ever get inside the haved dickens character in the way you get inside the heads of henry james. so it may than we then went through a phase of post modernism where we're play and ripping on the text and now we're going back into another internal world.% great. >> with regard to gains, let me throw you a softball. >> great. >> always appreciate that. you argue that our minds are being made sharper, but the age group that you talk about is usually the younger folks. did you give any thought to the value of gains and perhaps the use by older folks to keep the aging mind -- you know, keeping us going a little bit?