Note: I’m never going to get this all into one post, so I’m going to break it into chunks. Today’s chunk will cover a very general concern about Johnson’s dismissal of the question of the moral content of media. Jane Gallop wrote somewhere, “I want to resist the instrumentalism that would turn the teaching of English into the mere transmission of some amoral technical ability.” I have, perhaps, a related concern here. In a couple days I’ll move on to Johnson’s views on games, and sometime after that, television and film.
Okay, I just finished “Steven Johnson’s”:http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/ “??Everything Bad Is Good For You.??”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1573223077?v=glance More than the vast majority of books out there, it seems like a perfect fit for me. I am, and have long been, in love with the idea of culture, especially popular culture — not because popularity is a big thing for me, but because I’m not cut out to be an academic elitist (at least, not in the traditional sense) or a cultural conservative, and because one of the elements of “Dewey”:http://kukkurovaca.textdriven.com:2521/ugp/show/Dewey that I’m still excited about is the idea of _democratic culture_ — and a democratic culture must necessarily first be popular, i.e., public.
Plus, I like me some TV. Not to mention some internet.
But I’m not really the audience Johnson is aiming at — or, rather, I’m not in the choir he’s preaching to. Johnson deliberately discards the discussion around the moral content of popular culture — for example, whether there’s a problem with violence and sex in video games and television — in favor of an apparently amoral examination of the impact of popular cultural _forms_ on our _intelligence_ and/or _skills_. This is tied to an appeal to scientificity which, while it may or may not be justified — I wouldn’t know; its neuroscientific claims are outside my field — is not really thoroughly presented. I’m inclined to believe many if not all of his claims about problem-solving, complexity, etc. — they sound perfectly reasonable to me — but I can’t say I feel that they have the ring of scientific fact about them. They’re more in the nature of a plausible guess than of solid empirical evidence.
It’s amusing, in regard to this, to observe what sort of science Johnson identifies with:
bq. The approach followed in this book is more systematic than symbolic, more about causal relationships than metaphors. It is closer, in a sense, to physics than to poetry…Sometimes, for the sake of argument, I find it helpful to imagine culture as a kind of man-made weather system… (pp. 10-11)
The scientific study of weather, of course, taken as a scientific attempt to come to terms with specific causal relationships, is one of the most failed endeavors in history.
Also, some of his assumptions about “mental calisthenics” strengthening the mind and skills being generically and automatically transferrable are not necessarily on the most solid of ground; some of it, at any rate, smacks of views of human development that have been discredited for about a century. (Though for all I know, they’re coming back into vogue.) ??Everything Bad is Good For You?? falls into the proud tradition of arguments which are ornamented with, but do not emerge from, scientific language, findings, and principles. Which isn’t necessarily a horrible thing, but if I were doing it — and certainly I have, as I’m sure everyone has who’s written more than a handful of papers in his or her life — I wouldn’t be so quick to duck the questions of morality and content by appealing to the scientific nature of my inquiry.
bq. When most op-ed writers and talk show hosts discuss the social value of media, when they address the question of whether today’s media is or isn’t good for us, the underlying assumption is that entertainment improves us when it carries a healthy message…The usual counterargument here is that what media has lost in moral clarity it has gained in realism. The real world doesn’t come in nicely packaged public service announcements, and we’re better off with entertainment that reflects that fallen state with all its ethical ambiguity. I happen to be sympathetic to that argument, but it’s not the one I waant to make here. I think there is another way to assess the social virtue of pop culture, one tha tlooks at media as a kind of cognitive workout, not as a series of life lessons…There may indeed be more “negative messages” in the mediasphere today…But that’s not the only way to evaluate whether our television shows or video games are having a positive impact. Just as important — if not _more_ important — is the kind of thinking you have to do to make sense of a cultural experience…Today’s popular culture may not be showing us the righteous path. But it is making us smarter. (pp. 13-14)
Let’s say both things are true, and that people are being made less good and more intelligent at the same time. Exactly what we need more of in the world is _smart evil people_. Of course, I’m at least as susceptible to defenses of the moral content of much popular culture as Johnson is, but, as many people have found at great length during silly arguments about language, I’m wary of attempts to disentagle facts and values.
Johnson does return to this question at the end of the book, but not in a way that particularly satisfies me:
bq. Even if you accept the premise that a whole host of intellectual tools…have been enhanced by progressive trends in the popular culture, you can still reasonably object that all those improvements don’t cancel out the declining moral or behavioral standards advocated by these forms. In which case the Sleeper Curve would only be a consolation prize — we’re raising a generation of cognitive superstars who are nonetheless ethically rudderless. Intelligent, yes, but without values.
bq. I question that scenario for several reasons. First, I suspect we seriously overestimate the extent to which our core values are transmitted to us via the media. Most people understand that the characters on the screen are fictitious ones, and their flaws are there to amuse and entertain us, and not give us ethical guidance…Parents and peer groups are still vastly more influential where values are concerned…
bq. That some of the culture today does push at the boundary of acceptable or healthy moral values shouldn’t surprise us, because it is in the nature of myth and storytelling to explore the edges of a society’s accepted beliefs and conventions…We’re still retelling the Oedipus myth precisely because it around the violation of fundamental human values… (pp. 188-189)
He goes on to debunk the idea that violence in media leads to violence in life. (I wasn’t super-impressed with his argument, but I’m not part of the crowd that wants to see games sanitized of all violence anyway.) But as regards subtler issues of values, of moral sensibilities, of the “life lessons,” he casually dismisses, his argument literally gets no farther than, “We know the difference between reality and fantasy.” This seems to me to be horribly naive. While it’s true that I’m sure we all _comprehend_ this distinction at the level of reason and logic, it’s much more clear that human behavior and the mores that limit and guide it are not really at the mercy of the intellect. Quite the contrary. Morality is driven by taste, by feeling, and, to a nontrivial extent, by the images we consume. Popular culture plays a large role in defining what’s cool, and what we think is cool has a big influence on what we want to do and be. Because, while we may objectively understand the difference between right and wrong, cool and uncool gets at sex, power, and the American dream. It also plays a large role in defining what seems _normal_ and abnormal. Who we are and who we want to be.
To say that we get our values not just or primarily straight from media but rather/also from people around us is certainly valid in itself, but Johnson himself repeatedly and rightly underscores the socially mediated nature of our cultural consumption. The relationship between people around us and the media consume is somewhat more complicated than musical chairs; our peers do not supersede our cultural intake but _interact_ with it, frequently by re-inforcing it, either through direct participation, or indirectly, because our peers and family are themselves consumers as well.
And we have to keep in mind that we’re a nation that has historically been composed of people trying to build identities out of cultural material. ??The Joy of Cooking??, one of my favorite non-fiction books of all time, exists because a generation of women didn’t know how to be the wives they were expected to be, because the chain of cultural reproduction had been damaged. ??Joy of Cooking?? did not just teach women how to cook: it taught them how to _host_ — a whole suite of behaviors, habits, ideas, skills — many intangible or obscure — for fulfilling a role in their families and communities. It was making a _kind of person_. Child-rearing manuals have done something similar. And while we don’t consciously turn to works of fiction for the same kind of direct tutelage, it’s insane to suggest that portrayals of family life, of human behavior, etc., in the media we consume, are not influential in their own way.
Now, I don’t think that television is evil, or that video games are evil, but I do think that it’s bad thinking and bad writing to try to obscure the moral power — and thus responsibility — of our media. If, as Johnson says, popular cultural forms can make us more _capable_, that’s great, but it only serves to underscore the importance of the question of how we use our expanded capabilities.
Haven’t we all read and/or watched ??Spider-Man???
_This is continued in parts “two”:http://kukkurovaca.textdriven.com/gramarye/archives/everything-bad-is-good-for-you-2-games-and-problems and “three._”:http://kukkurovaca.textdriven.com/gramarye/archives/everything-bad-is-good-for-you-3-television
[...] Johnson’s primary defense of reality tv is that it emphasizes social intelligence, asking us to follow sophisticated problems in group behavior. I’m willing to grant this point, but it does nothing to assuage my concerns about the kind of moral conditioning that they impose on their viewers during the process. No need for me to re-expound on this (I provided at least enough verbiage about it in this post), but it’s particularly problematic in reality tv, where people are essentially rewarded for being as horrible as possible—not to mention that the basic premise involves people effacing their own humanity and trying out for humiliation and suffering. [...]