Brain Candy

Q: Where did you get the idea for Everything Bad Is Good For You’s central argument?

A: I had been batting around an idea for a book of collected essays. I knew I wanted the opening to be about video games because I had this sense people were not understanding, on some basic level, how hard they are. A lot of people still think video games are like Pac-Man. And I was going to do a bunch of other contrarian pieces. I thought, well, I’ll do something about television, because television has become so much better and nobody talks about that. In fact, in the States there’s been this huge debate about television. It’s between two sides: one side thinks television, and pop culture in general, is so bad the Feds need to intervene; the other side just thinks pop culture is bad. When I started refuting [those positions], what was supposed to be a collection of disjointed essays actually turned into the most linear of my books.

Q: The title seems to refute the conventional wisdom that all mass media needs to be dumb.

A: In the ’70s, television became this mass thing, where 99 per cent of the homes had a TV. It got pretty dumb: Happy Days, Joanie Loves Chachi, Starsky and Hutch – all terrible television. Programmers were trying to capture the attention of the most people – but not offend them in any way. A programmer at NBC at the time called this “the theory of least objectionable programming.” That was the goal. When you’re in a mass medium, you tend to go for lowest common denominator.

But I disagree with the assumption that people will always opt for the least challenging thing, that people are innately slackers when it comes to media. If that were true, the history of video game programming would produce games that were ever more simple to complete. But in fact, the opposite has happened. Games are more challenging than they’ve ever been. Because people enjoy being challenged.

Q: But are video games a mass medium? A lot of people play them, sure, but that’s a certain subset of the population. I bet if you compared a typical video game player with a typical member of the wider population, the gamer would be smarter.

A: We do think of video games as being a central component of today’s pop culture. When people do the litany of complaints about how everything has become stupid, gaming is always part of that litany. My book is saying that one of the major things you’re complaining about – video games – are actually really rich in terms of the cognitive demands they place on the people who play them.

Courtesy Penguin Group.

Q: You say television is growing more complex because we’ve been trained to deal with that complexity – by television itself, as well as interactive media. But how much of that increase in complexity comes from the fact that TV is no longer a mass medium? Thanks to digital cable and satellite television, in the last decade, TV has become a precisely targeted product aimed at small demographic niches. So perhaps some shows just happen to target the niche of smarter viewers – and that’s why they are more complex.

A: A couple of things to say about that. When Hill Street Blues aired in 1981, people complained because they thought it was too hard to understand. Despite incredible critical reviews the show had a tough time finding an audience, and in fact, in 1985, they fired [producer Steven] Bochco and deliberately made the show simpler to understand. Today, Alias, 24 and The Sopranos are far more complicated than Hill Street ever was. So I think you have to acknowledge something has changed in people’s minds, allowing them to follow these more complicated shows. There’s a chart I have in the book that tracks social relationships in an episode of 24 compared to an episode of Dallas. So 24, in one episode, will often have 25 characters with this incredible web of complex relations. Dallas was, like, three times simpler. And I suspect what has happened is that the more interactive forms [of media] – the video games and the internet and other things – have played an active role in terms of enhancing our mental faculties. Television has caught up with that.

Q: Sure. Or perhaps there were always people around who were smart enough to watch Alias and Lost – even in the ’70s. But those people weren’t watching TV. Maybe they were reading books.

A: That’s an interesting theory. I’ve never thought about it that way. Maybe that’s right. But I would think there are actually fewer intelligent people watching TV now because the intelligent people are all, you know, writing on their weblog or something.

Q: OK, we’ve been talking about a few different pop cultures: reading novels, watching TV and movies and playing video games. Cognitively speaking, which do you think is best for us?

A: It depends. There’s such a huge difference between reading, you know, Middlemarch and reading a paperback romance novel. And between playing Quake and SimCity, say. But OK, I won’t quibble. I would say reading books and playing video games are equally beneficial, roughly and in distinct ways. And movies and TV are trailing behind those, although it depends on the television show or the movie.

Q: In what way do you think these supposedly bad things are good for you? What do they make us better at, in real life?

A: Making decisions. Trying to figure out where your priorities should be. And then you also have keeping track of social networks – who is getting along with whom, and who isn’t, and who you should invite over to dinner. All that sort of thinking – your social and emotional intelligence.

Q: A lot of the people who really dig Alias are somewhat nerdy. Perhaps that’s the sort of training they could use.

A: Actually, I think the best shows for developing emotional intelligence come from reality TV, like The Apprentice and Survivor.

Q: Let’s say Everything Bad Is Good For You becomes incredibly successful. But because you’ve alleviated some of the guilt of consumers who don’t read, your own book greases the long slow death of books in general. How would that make you feel?

A: Well, from the tropical island I’d buy with the proceeds… No, it’s funny you ask that, because I have a friend, a literary novelist, and he said, “I hate you because the only reason most people buy literary novels is because they feel guilty about watching too much TV. Now they won’t feel guilty, so they’ll never buy another literary novel.” But in the unlikely event that my book changes the course of cultural media history and people stop reading books, then I would write a very angry polemic about how reading’s endangered, in an effort to get more people to read.