Everything Bad Is Good for You Read Free Page B

that mass culture follows a steadily declining path toward lowest-common-denominator standards, presumably because the “masses” want dumb, simple pleasures and big media companies want to give the masses what they want. But in fact, the exact opposite is happening: the culture is getting more intellectually demanding, not less.
    Most of the time, criticism that takes pop culture seriously involves performing some kind of symbolic analysis, decoding the work to demonstrate the way it represents some other aspect of society. You can see this symbolic approach at work in academic cultural studies programs analyzing the ways in which pop forms expressed the struggle of various disenfranchised groups: gays and lesbians, people of color, women, the third world. You can see it at work in the “zeitgeist” criticism featured in media sections of newspapers and newsweeklies, where the critic establishes a symbolic relationship between the work and some spirit of the age: yuppie self-indulgence, say, or post-9/11 anxiety.
    The approach followed in this book is more systemic than symbolic, more about causal relationships than metaphors. It is closer, in a sense, to physics than to poetry. My argument for the existence of the Sleeper Curve comes out of an assumption that the landscape of popular culture involves the clash of competing forces: the neurological appetites of the brain, the economics of the culture industry, changing technological platforms. The specific ways in which those forces collide play a determining role in the type of popular culture we ultimately consume. The work of the critic, in this instance, is to diagram those forces, not decode them.
    Sometimes, for the sake of argument, I find it helpful to imagine culture as a kind of man-made weather system. Float a mass of warm, humid air over cold ocean water, and you’ll create an environment in which fog will thrive. The fog doesn’t appear because it somehow symbolically reenacts the clash of warm air and cool water. Fog arrives instead as an emergent effect of that particular system and its internal dynamics. The same goes with popular culture: certain kinds of environments encourage cognitive complexity; others discourage complexity. The cultural object—the film or the video game—is not a metaphor for that system; it’s more like an output or a result.
    The forces at work in these systems operate on multiple levels: underlying changes in technology that enable new kinds of entertainment; new forms of online communications that cultivate audience commentary about works of pop culture; changes in the economics of the culture industry that encourage repeat viewing; and deep-seated appetites in the human brain that seek out reward and intellectual challenge. To understand those forces we’ll need to draw upon disciplines that don’t usually interact with one another: economics, narrative theory, social network analysis, neuroscience.
    This is a story of trends, not absolutes. I do not believe that most of today’s pop culture is made up of masterpieces that will someday be taught alongside Joyce and Chaucer in college survey courses. The television shows and video games and movies that we’ll look at in the coming pages are not, for the most part, Great Works of Art. But they are more complex and nuanced than the shows and games that preceded them. While the Sleeper Curve maps average changes across the pop cultural landscape—and not just the complexity of single works—I have focused on a handful of representative examples in the interest of clarity. (The endnotes offer a broader survey.)
    I believe that the Sleeper Curve is the single most important new force altering the mental development of young people today, and I believe it is largely a force for good: enhancing our cognitive faculties, not dumbing them down. And yet you almost never hear this story in popular accounts of today’s media.