The benefits of TV watching

Steven Johnson has an excerpt from his forthcoming book, Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter, in the New York Times Magazine this weekend.

The article, entitled "Watching TV Makes You Smarter", looks at the way that television has become increasingly complex and novelistic in its narrative techniques. Comparing the structures of the storylines of quality television in the 70s and today, Johnson determines that today's shows demand more from their viewers. Describing an episode of 24, Johnson says,

Nine primary narrative threads wind their way through those 44 minutes, each drawing extensively upon events and information revealed in earlier episodes. Draw a map of all those intersecting plots and personalities, and you get structure that -- where formal complexity is concerned -- more closely resembles ''Middlemarch'' than a hit TV drama of years past like ''Bonanza.''

The best dramas of today withhold information from the audience, like The West Wing's habit of depicting fast, complicated discussions the subject of which the viewer is not fully informed of; or do not shy away from technical language that an audience may not understand, such as the medical terminology in ER; or have long-term, complicated storylines involving many characters, with small events of one episode having repercussions many episodes later, like in The Sopranos.

Johnson goes on to show that even in medium-brow entertainment like sitcoms, and also in the accepted lowest common denominator of television today, the reality show, the level of viewer interaction has increased dramatically over the years -- the shows have increasingly become more complex:

Reality programming borrowed another key ingredient from games: the intellectual labor of probing the system's rules for weak spots and opportunities. As each show discloses its conventions, and each participant reveals his or her personality traits and background, the intrigue in watching comes from figuring out how the participants should best navigate the environment that has been created for them. The pleasure in these shows comes not from watching other people being humiliated on national television; it comes from depositing other people in a complex, high-pressure environment where no established strategies exist and watching them find their bearings. That's why the water-cooler conversation about these shows invariably tracks in on the strategy displayed on the previous night's episode: why did Kwame pick Omarosa in that final round? What devious strategy is Richard Hatch concocting now?

Johnson argues that these programs (the quality dramas, the new sitcoms and reality shows) are actually helping people by exercising their intelligence. Television viewing has become less passive and now demands more interaction on the part of the audience. Thus popular culture today is not the mind-numbing intellectual sedative that some critics make it out to be, but rather fulfils a similar fuction as crosswords, novels and debating. Johnson qualifies this by noting that some programs are better than others; that some are more engaging than others, some make you think more:

In pointing out some of the ways that popular culture has improved our minds, I am not arguing that parents should stop paying attention to the way their children amuse themselves. What I am arguing for is a change in the criteria we use to determine what really is cognitive junk food and what is genuinely nourishing. Instead of a show's violent or tawdry content, instead of wardrobe malfunctions or the F-word, the true test should be whether a given show engages or sedates the mind. Is it a single thread strung together with predictable punch lines every 30 seconds? Or does it map a complex social network? Is your on-screen character running around shooting everything in sight, or is she trying to solve problems and manage resources? If your kids want to watch reality TV, encourage them to watch ''Survivor'' over ''Fear Factor.'' If they want to watch a mystery show, encourage ''24'' over ''Law and Order.'' If they want to play a violent game, encourage Grand Theft Auto over Quake. Indeed, it might be just as helpful to have a rating system that used mental labor and not obscenity and violence as its classification scheme for the world of mass culture.

Johnson's thesis is intriguing, and I found his analysis of the narrative structures of different shows fascinating. I think his book would be a very interesting read.