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know Steven Johnson as not just the founder of FEED, one of the most innovative early online magazines; not only as the esteemed author of four books, the most recent of which is Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture is Actually Making us Smarter — I also know him as an unkempt college friend with a penchant for technology and pop culture, and a preternatural capacity to subsist on a diet of Lucky Charms, Stouffers blueberry croissants and Budweiser tallboys. Fifteen years later, Steven's fourth book, Everything Bad, makes a convincing case that watching television and playing video games is better for your brain than sniffing glue, and maybe even better than reading pulp fiction. During the last several decades, both television and video games have become a lot more complex and mentally stimulating. This is not, of course, a Hollywood public service — in the age of DVDs and international television syndication, Steven eloquently argues, the most successful shows are no longer the "least objectionable," as network executives used to say, but rather the "most repeatable" — shows that hold up to multiple viewings.
    When I first heard of the premise of Everything Bad, I couldn't help but wonder, thinking back on Steven's mysterious ability to extract nutritional value from junk

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food, whether this wasn't a clever attempt to defend a youthful lifestyle while selling enough books to pay for it. This theory did not survive scrutiny, however — Steven no longer eats sweet cereal, and is too busy writing books and raising children to enjoy the brain-boosting benefits of compulsive video game consumption. Everything Bad, it turns out, is an important and well-timed contribution to our thinking about the evolution of media and the people who consume it. It's an eloquently assembled polemic, and a great read. I sat down with Steven one evening with a bottle of wine to shoot the shit about the success of his book and the obsolescence of the format. — Rufus Griscom

Were you surprised that the book has done so well overseas?
I was wondering about the international question, because it's such an American book, but I think it's partially because American pop culture is the global pop culture on some level, so everyone's concerned about the issue.

I can imagine Europeans responding more critically because they sense all this toxic American culture seeping across their borders.
Well, the head of the BBC gave this speech where he cited the book. He said, "If you go back and look at the original Doctor Who series, it really wasn't very good. Our new Doctor Who is much better." So even the head of the BBC seems to agree that things are getting better. And much of the book is about how whatever's going on now, at least it's better than Dukes of Hazzard and Fantasy Island and The Love Boat. One of the things that I've learned from doing these interviews in Europe is that they think all the great TV today is coming from America. They're watching the Sopranos, 24, Alias . . .

I would guess that your crankiest responses come from older critics.
Actually, the criticism has tended to come from the Left, not the Right. From the older Left. I'll do these radio shows and people will call in and say "We haven't had a television in our house since 1975 and our kids are in grad school now and doing incredibly well!" And I'll say, "I think television was pretty bad in 1975, but you have no idea what's on television if you haven't watched it for thirty years." So the folks who tend to be critical are that sort of crunchy, progressive Left, which in many ways I normally belong to.

The Right Wing pretty much haven't engaged with it at all. The only Right Wing thing I did was the Michael Medved radio show. He kept bringing everything back to Grand Theft Auto, which happens a lot. And I'm like, look, Grand Theft Auto is a pretty offensive game, but it's not the only game.

Although it is a very popular game.
It's true. It also happens to be a pretty good game. Anybody who's spent any time watching TV and playing video games will tell you that they are two fundamentally different experiences. When you're involved in one of these games you're doing this tremendous amount of problem solving. You think about your available resources, think about the patterns, think about your long-term objectives. And then you make choices based on the immediate feedback you get from the game. That's one of the most fundamental definitions of what it means to be smart: the ability to look at all the consequences of potential actions and make a choice.

Did you ever get flak for playing too many video games?
I've always had a slightly distant relationship to games, with one or two exceptions. I've always loved Sim City and I got really into the Myst games. But there aren't a lot of games that I've actually finished. I might even say I'm slightly below average. Well, maybe not for a thirty-seven year old.

The trend you identify in television and video games toward more complex narratives is harder to see in the print business. Does your theory apply to the publishing industry?
I didn't talk about print and music much. Part of that is because I'm talking about problem solving and that kind of cognition just doesn't happen when you listen to music. And with books, the technology hasn't changed. One of the things that I talk about in the book is the way that TiVO has created this economic incentive for making things more complicated because you want to sell shows that can be watched four or five times. The syndication pay-off for Seinfeld and The Simpsons was huge. And one of the reasons they did so well is that they were fun to watch over and over. They had so many layers of complexity.

There are those who say feature-length films will soon be DVDs that you'll be able to interact with as a character, that everything is trending towards interactivity. Do you buy this?
I think people really like to be captivated by a story and taken for a ride. There's pleasure in that that we shouldn't underestimate. There's a very old, innate pleasure in storytelling that's part of our being.

It's the narrative-submissive instinct.
Right, you want to lose yourself in somebody else's story some of the time and some of the time you want to discover yourself in the story. But in some cases the line is blurred — for instance, the show Lost on ABC is a great example of how TV has changed. It's an extremely complicated narrative about a plane wreck on an island. If they'd done it twenty years ago there would have been a two-hour opening sequence where you would have been introduced to each character just like they used to do in the airport disaster movies in the '70s. You would have learned their back-stories, and then the plane would have crashed and you'd have watched them struggle for survival. Instead, what Lost did was start with the plane crash, and then spend the whole season slowly unraveling all the threads. It's fabulous television, but to accept it, you have to be willing to be confused and in the dark for long periods of time.

One interest of mine in recent years has been the desirability of cultural products that are high-brow and low-brow at the same time. You can walk into any episode of The Simpsons or Seinfeld and choose either to focus on the sophisticated satire or just the physical humor that's about as dumbed-down as it comes. The Sopranos is another great example — you have sex and violence, which is more viscerally appealing than anything in Leave it to Beaver, arguably, and then you have the sophistication of the narrative and cinematography. Is this an alternative argument — that the movement towards narrative complexity is only successful when combined with an element of broad appeal?
The Sopranos might be the one show that we'll look back at and say, "This was one of the great works of art of our day." The aesthetic competence makes it equivalent to one of the great nineteenth-century novels. Some of the other shows, like Lost or 24, took a similarly complicated narrative structure, but made it sexy and fun. Nobody sits through them thinking they're watching a Jean-Luc Godard film.

It's pleasurable in real time.
Exactly.

TV producers have realized that if you can broadcast on multiple frequencies at the same time, the show can work for different audiences.
Kurt Anderson observed that this is a really Spielberg-like innovation. Jaws both invented the blockbuster and did another thing that was very influential. A twelve-year-old could see it and just think, "Oh my God, that shark is huge!" But it's also a very subtle film. It had a lot of political layers — the whole town dynamic, the class struggle going on. The critics could get really into it without feeling like they were slumming.

Now we see a migration from fiction to memoir, from third-person to first-person, the rise of blogging and reality television. A clear movement towards everything being first-person.
We've grown weary of fake things. For instance, we're slowly being weaned off laugh tracks. You watch Curb Your Enthusiasm for a while, and then you turn on Everybody Loves Raymond and you're like, "Why are all these people laughing? I can get the jokes myself." And the authenticity of blogging, like "I don't need an editor, I can get my voice out there directly." And to some extent, what you might call the kind of artificial reality of reality TV.

Malcolm Gladwell brought this up in The New Yorker. If somebody got up and tried to give a speech like Lincoln today, it would seem fake. A comparison to make is a Clinton press conference. When you watch Clinton speaking, unscripted, answering questions with that kind of incredible fluency, but also with realism and a folksiness and use of the common vernacular, that's really amazing authenticity. If he suddenly said, "Four score and twenty years ago," it would just seem ludicrous. Today that people don't want to deal with the artifice.

Yeah, it always sounds so funny to me in The New York Times when a person writes "At that point, the reporter sat down for lunch with the interviewee" or whatever. It smacks of something unnecessarily formal and out of touch. I was hoping to establish in this conversation that both online magazines and online dating are the future. Can you help me with that? Is there more authenticity in the online environment?
Sure. Clearly, I think something radical happened. It has really become about users creating content as much as the professionals. Several years ago the question was, "Is this going to lead to this quasi-suburban culture where people just sit in front of their screens and lose touch with the vitality of urban centers and the emotional fluency of talking in person?" In fact, if you look at the most interesting trends online in the last three or four years, aside from blogging, they all lean toward flesh-and-blood social connection. Online dating is changing peoples' lives, the way that they meet people and the way that they think about their social life.

It's nice to see a love-letter renaissance in the online-dating phenomenon. Using words to seduce people has suddenly become dramatically more common. If you're seventeen, you feel like, "Gosh, I really have to get good at wooing people using a keyboard."
You're exactly right. You read through those things and the first thing you see is that people put a lot of time into them. They're very funny and creative. They really capture somebody and there's a lot of love put into these portraits. They're not just saying "What r u wearing?"

Returning to the book, you skirt the moral question a bit by saying that you're constraining your argument to only the positive mental effects of the new media products. So this leaves open the possibility that smarter television and video games are also creating smarter, more violent perverts.
[Laughs] I would accept somebody saying to me, "I do think the culture is getting smarter and that kids are better at problem solving, but the morality is so out of whack that I ultimately don't think it's worth it." I wouldn't agree with that argument, but I could see somebody making it. The problem is that nobody's been making that argument. People were just saying that the culture has gotten dumber. I felt like parents are just not that informed about this positive side. They heard all the panic scare stories, like the Columbine shooters, like that's what your kids are going to be turned into if you let them play video games.

But we can imagine a scenario in which video games will have more violent components and more sexual components, because these are powerful human experiences and people want to have powerful human experiences. Could there come a point where we decide that beating people up and killing people is so realistic in these virtual environments that we need some kind of virtual law enforcement?
That's really interesting. In a sense, to make the question even bigger, these virtual worlds are going to be experimental grounds for alternate societies, alternate forms of social organization and so forth. In a sense, they're run largely as anarchies now — functioning anarchies with this weird presence of the company that controls the whole thing. But the company doesn't want to have too heavy a hand in there, and so basically the system regulates itself. People discourage other players from gratuitously killing, and you see these self-organizing legal and justice systems sprouting. And as they get more complicated and more populated, not only will people have to form some kind of police departments, but they'll experiment with different kinds of police — maybe a militia would be better, or maybe we should vote to re-elect police officers every year to make sure they're answerable to the community the way politicians are. You might actually be able to do trial runs of alternate forms of society in a way that Karl Marx could only dream of.

What interests me is how much more violence you can get away with than sex. For instance, in Grand Theft Auto, I think you get some energy points by having sex in this back alley, but unlike everything else in Grand Theft Auto, it's completely covered up. In the video game environment you can have brains oozing out of a skull . . .
But whatever you do, don't show a nipple.

And even on HBO you might have some nipples and some breasts, but the violence you see on The Sopranos still exceeds the sexuality.
It's a really good point. The games aren't generally very sexual. The Grand Theft Auto example is one of the few you could make, and there are one or two others. But there's really almost no sex in games, and it's not entirely because they're worried about the ratings. There's something right now about the gaming experience that just doesn't make it particularly amenable to sexual fantasy. People still need to see the real thing on some level. The cartoon version just won't totally cut it yet. We're probably two or three console generations away from genuinely photorealistic human life forms being created by a chip.

I'm not sure I agree with that. Things like Japanese anime aren't being constrained by the limits of flesh and bones, and that can be an asset in the porn world. Plastic surgery is cheaper with animation.
But that's still kind of a subculture. It's not a dominant strain in commercial sex in this country. People are largely still looking at videos, looking at pictures, having sex with their partners, and having sex with, you know . . .

Stuffed animals?
But Japan may be the future. I mean, it has been in the past.

You've defended all sorts of wonderful television coming out these days. Are there any shows that you just can't really defend? For instance, I Want to Be a Hilton can't be making people smarter.
Definitely not. Television is just a smaller version of the internet — there's stuff at the bottom of the barrel and there's stuff at the top. When you and I were growing up, there was no I Want to Be a Hilton, but there was also no Discovery Channel. But to be fair, I do think there's too much stupid reality TV on right now. I suspect that it won't last forever, but it's had an effect on comedy. There was this great moment of Seinfeld and The Simpsons were you thought, "Oh, the sitcom is coming into its own, television comedy is so great and the writing is so great," and then Curb Your Enthusiasm came out and you were like, "Oh my God!" and there was Larry Sanders on HBO before that, and you thought to yourself, "Jesus!" And unfortunately it hasn't really panned out. Arrested Development has really struggled to stay on the air even though it's a fabulous, really smart show.

One of the things I enjoy about your book, and this is also true of Non-Zero by Robert Wright, is that it's something I can point to when I hear the older generation saying that the world is going to shit.
When I was writing it I kept noticing how often people would just casually say that everything today is dumbed-down, or that everything now is so instant-gratification. All these clichés. So one of the things I'm most hopeful about is that next time somebody says, "Everybody's sitting around playing those stupid video games," there's going to be someone at the cocktail party who says, "Actually, did you see that book?" And frankly, the folks who are saying that now should know better, because their parents were saying the same thing about rock n' roll thirty years ago.

As an old person who is out of touch with new culture, you can either say, "I no longer get it," or "the world is going to hell." The latter is more appealing for many people.
It's just easier to think that whatever the kids are doing, they're up to no good.

It's a kind of laziness, I think.
Yes. They are the slackers.

Okay, let's go play some video games.  n°

To buy Everything Bad is Good for You click here.

©2005 Rufus Griscom and hooksexup.com.