Pop (Culture) Rocks

Everything Bad is Good For You
I've begun reading a new book by Steven Johnson that has captured my attention within the first dozen pages.

Johnson writes about a "Sleeper Curve" named after a scene in the Woody Allen movie "Sleeper."  The mock Sci-Fi has a team of scientists from the year 2173 astounded to find that 20th century society failed to understand the nutritional merits of junk food.

For instance, as a child the book's author played a baseball simulation game called APBA (American Professional Baseball Association) which required elaborate tracking of player data and dice rolls. The game contained grid cards with cryptic digits and charts that captured numerically the players aptitude on the baseball diamond.  It was like pretending to be a team manager and playing baseball with cards.

From there the author moved on Dungeons & Dragons. If ever a game was the bane of parents – it was this game.  D&D was played with many-sided dice, and grid sheets to track movements of fantasy Tolkein-esque characters through forests and dungeons while they did battle with trolls, orcs, goblins, and dragons, finding treasure and magical weapons along the way.  Players consulted bewildering charts and formulas to determine  their characters' success in the game.  Health bonuses, advancing character levels, and '+1 Swords' all helped determine whether a player did damage to a fantasy baddie or if their character took a kobold's mace to the face.

As an adult, Johnson reviews all his old baseball simulation cards and D&D character sheets to discover that the entertainment once viewed as a maverick obsession has become a mainstream pursuit and a component of mainstream entertainment.

The kind of thinking being done with the roll of a 20-sided dice in bedrooms and basements in the name of fun and games is actually practice in system analysis, probability theory, and pattern recognition.

"This is the Sleeper Curve: The most debased forms of mass diversion – video games and violent television dramas and juvenile sitcoms – turn out to be nutritional after all."  What is perceived as the declining path to the lowest common denominator is actually a "culture getting more intellectually demanding, not less."

From the introduction: "Next time you hear someone complaining about violent TV mobsters, or accidental on-screen nudity, or the inanity of reality programming, or the dull stares of the Nintendo addicts, you should think about the Sleeper Curve rising steadily beneath all that superficial chaos.  The sky is not falling. In many ways, the weather has never been better. It just takes a new kind of barometer to tell the difference."

Everything Is Bad For You.
How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter
by Steven Johnson.

Comments

[dr freud]

You have got to be kidding... All humour aside, the sheer idea that senseless violence, pathological desensitization and gross ignorance towards base societal ideals, could ever be healthy, is ludicrous.

I find it quite amazing that you would suggest that this kind of behaviour is an "evolution" of society's consciousness, or an increase in the "I.Q." of the public's gene pool.

I suggest reading a little about "systematic desensitization"... or any study of violence and its impact on young and old as a norm modifier.

Better yet, walk around Queens with change jingling in your pants, around 2 a.m. on a Monday evening.... See what the "higher intellectual demand" of society does to you in about 30 seconds!

[Don The Idea Guy]

Well Doc, I'm of the school that says everything in moderation - nothing to excess. One can certainly take any practice to an extreme so that you can find an 'absolute good' or an 'absolute bad'.

In my opinion the book is simply pointing out that not all things considered 'bad' for you are 100% bad. Some folks take drinking to an extreme and endanger the welfare of themselves and others, but there is also medical proof to show beer and wine taken in moderation can actually prove beneficial to your health.

The internet is sometimes singled out as 'weapon of mass distraction' and the cause of addiction, a tool of illegal music downloads, and a portal for porn -- but it's also the single most helpful tool for disseminating information, making connections with people all over the world, and one of the reasons our youngest generation has the ability to install and maintain complete computer systems and complicated networking functions while their parents still haven't figured out how to stop the VCR from blinking "12:00-12:00-12:00-12:00".

To flip your 2am-change-jingling scenario on its ear: perhaps the lesson learned is the valuable knowledge NOT to go for early morning strolls in dangerous parts of town while jingling change in your pocket.