Does TV make you smart? Steven Berlin Johnson, author of Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter, makes the argument for a surprising and resounding "yes."
As the keynote speaker for the Banff World Television Festival, Johnson set the stage for a gathering of industry insiders who kept coming back to the theme of leveraging the new platforms younger viewers are gravitating toward – from the Internet to mobile video devices like iPods and cell phones.
At the festival, he was perhaps preaching to the converted, but his controversial bestselling book has inspired agreement in unlikely places. Johnson recounted an anecdote of appearing on British radio to defend his thesis. He was surprised when his supposed challenger responded by saying: "I have to say I was shocked that he managed to write an entire book about the intelligence of popular culture without once mentioning Buffy the Vampire Slayer," then launching into a discourse about the structural and philosophical complexity of that show.
Johnson calls his thesis the Sleeper Curve, after the Woody Allen movie Sleeper, where an organic food store owner from the '70s wakes up 200 years later to a world where hot fudge sundaes and cheeseburgers are health foods. Unfortunately, Johnson's argument doesn't extend to justifying a chocolate addiction, but he points out that video games and television have grown far more complex over the past couple of decades, leading to an audience increasingly trained in cognitive complexity – an audience that has to think harder and more creatively to follow Lost or 24, or the games Civilization IV or SimCity.
One measure of complexity he uses is the reduced amount of narrative handholding in current television."The audience now has a willingness to be confused, to be challenged," he said, pointing to the medical jargon of a show like ER, which doesn't expect its audience to follow the intricate medical procedures but does expect us to pick up on important clues to character and story buried in them, or The West Wing, which would routinely show characters responding to events and information that has been withheld from the audience, until a later reveal in the episode.
Johnson also contrasts the single narratives of Starsky and Hutch with the later Hill Street Blues, which he credits as being one of the first shows to have many simultaneous storylines combined with more complex subject matter than the soap operas that have long used the technique.
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