Defending ‘Everything Bad’

There seem to be two Steven Johnsons. And at this particular moment, it’s hard to believe they’re the same guy.

There’s Steven Johnson, Swell Dad, who sits with you in his Brooklyn dining room and politely interrupts your conversation to commune with a way-cute toddler who’s dashed in bearing bottled water and news from the outside world.

“Hi, Rowan! Oh, thank you, that’s very helpful. Was it hot outside, buddy?” he says.

Then there’s Steven Johnson, Parents’ Nightmare, who’s been parading around calling video games like “Grand Theft Auto” and TV shows like “24” brain food for your kids. He’s the provocateur who titled his most recent book “Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter” -- a deliberate nana-nana-boo-boo to the books-are-better crowd.

“The most debased forms of mass diversion -- video games and violent television dramas and juvenile sitcoms -- turn out to be nutritional after all,” Johnson writes. They offer an increasingly rigorous “cognitive workout.” And the mental skills they hone “are just as important as the ones exercised by reading books.”

Well.

You’re a parent of teenagers who has spent years trying to reduce their exposure to the addictive, sexualized, violent and relentlessly commercial output of the great American pop culture machine. You’ve read “Everything Bad” and found it smart and stimulating but also infuriating.

Twelve pages from the end, you’ve hit a passage so annoying it made you want to fling Johnson’s argument back in his handsome, smiling face.

Which would be a lot easier if he weren’t such a likable guy -- and if that charming child of his didn’t keep getting in the way.

Johnson’s championship of popular culture comes with a significant irony: If he’d been born just a couple of years earlier than 1968, he’d likely be teaching “Middlemarch” to undergraduates today.

Always a huge reader, he majored in semiotics as an undergraduate at Brown and English lit as a grad student at Columbia. “I sat there reading 75 19th century novels when I was 24,” he says, laughing, “and it’s a huge part of who I am.”

But Johnson would also sit for hours playing first baseball simulation games, then electronic games. Still, he was no obsessive -- until “Myst” and “Sim City.”

Exploring the vivid worlds of the new games “was, like, oh my God, I feel like I fast-forwarded 10 years,” he says. “Sim City” gave him the feeling that the urban landscape he was shaping on his computer screen was “almost like a life form.”

If a single game could come alive that way, what would a whole computer-connected world be like? It was the perfect question for a tech-loving guy who wanted to write.

Goodbye, “Middlemarch”; hello, Feed magazine.

Johnson helped start one of the first significant general interest publications online. In a few years, the company was doing well enough to raise a few million dollars and hire a real chief executive -- just in time for the market to crash.

Feed was history. But Johnson came out just fine. The magazine had helped establish him as a chronicler of the networked world. He had one book out and another poised for publication.

In “Interface Culture” (1997), he explored the idea that because we’re now sharing so many communal spaces online, interfaces and the folks who create them are hugely important. In “Emergence” (2001), he looked at self-organizing systems in everything from ant colonies to computer simulations. In last year’s “Mind Wide Open,” he offered a lively tour through the workings of the brain.

Meanwhile, he had been charting the “incredible growth in complexity and challenge” of those video games that non-gamers still thought of as moronic, immoral or both. Then he thought: Isn’t television evolving the same way? Weren’t shows like “The Sopranos,” “The Simpsons,” “Seinfeld” and “24” demanding more of their viewers at the same time the tube was under attack for producing sleazy, lowest-common-denominator fare?

“It occurred to me that there was a bigger argument to be made,” Johnson says.

He steeled himself for a negative reaction -- because if “Everything Bad” did its job, it was going to make some people mad.

Sure enough, there’s a mad person sitting in his dining room right now.

You want to shout at him.

What about the stuff “Everything Bad” ignores? What about all that sex and violence you don’t want your kids exposed to? Or the highly addictive nature of video games? Or the toxic sea of commercialism in which all that televised complexity must float?

But it would be best, perhaps, to start with points of agreement.

You agree that book-loving snobs tend to ignore that video games can be challenging and absorbing. And that “The Sopranos” is complicated and subtle as well as violent. You love how comfortable your kids are with new technology and agree that “the ability to take in a complex system and learn its rules on the fly is a talent with great real-world applicability. Maybe they can support you in your old age.

To summarize briefly: He’s talking trends, not absolutes, and over the last 30 years, the trend in video games and television shows has been toward more cognitively demanding forms.

Why? Human brains are drawn to systems in which “rewards are both clearly defined and achieved by exploring an environment,” he suggests. Gamers must figure out the rules as they go along, and “no other pop cultural form directly engages the brain’s decision-making apparatus” as video games do.

With television, complex narratives that “force you to work to make sense of them” have been rewarded by a marketplace where profit now depends heavily on repeat performances, on DVD or in syndication.

Games aren’t “Hamlet” or “The Great Gatsby,” Johnson writes; they’re more like mathematical logic problems, teaching “abstract skills in probability, in pattern recognition, in understanding causal relations that can be applied in countless situations.”

But he plays down, or leaves out entirely, too many questions: What about all that sex and violence? Does “Grand Theft Auto” have to make people smarter by rewarding them for killing prostitutes?

“I feel like the values questions, the violence questions, all those kind of content questions that I kind of put off to the side, I don’t put off to the side because they’re irrelevant,” he says. Violence “is absolutely a legitimate thing to talk about.”

Can’t constantly gaming kids become addicted? “Absolutely. No question about it,” Johnson says, but the brain’s craving for rewards, like the Force in “Star Wars,” can be used for good as well: “You can get them to do things much more challenging mentally than what I was doing when I was sitting around watching TV” as a kid.

Some parents object as much to television advertising as to the shows themselves, with kids constantly being told that buying stuff is the key to feeling good about themselves.

Johnson’s solution? Well, he and his wife don’t watch much regular TV. “We started watching all these TV shows on DVD,” he says -- “Six Feet Under,” “24,” “The West Wing” -- “which is the most beautiful way to watch them, because you get to see the long format narrative at its best.”

Even reality television is better than old-time game shows or “Mork & Mindy,” he maintains, because it enhances viewers’ emotional intelligence by getting them to “analyze and recall the full range of social relationships in a large group.”

Wouldn’t they learn faster by turning off the tube and interacting with actual human beings?

“Exactly right,” he says calmly. But if you assume “people are going to spend some amount of their time in front of screens....”

Not assuming that, apparently, isn’t an option.

Time to bring up the passage that so maddened you when you came across it near the end of “Everything Bad,” when he finally admits that “a specific, historically crucial kind of reading has grown less common in this society: sitting down with a three-hundred-page book and following its argument or narrative without a great deal of distraction.” It’s true that video games and TV do a poor job of “training our minds to follow a sustained textual argument or narrative.”

But not to worry: “We still have schools and parents to teach wisdom that the popular culture fails to impart.”

Thanks a lot, pal! No problem! We’ll just drag ‘em away from those Xboxes and whup ‘em into shape!

Just what does he think schools and parents are competing with? you ask.

He is unfazed.

After all, he has made his argument in a 200-page book.

“Middlemarch” will doubtless survive, he says.

“Hey, little man,” Johnson says. Here comes that cute toddler again.

Every morning his brother, not quite 4, “turns on that computer, pulls down his user account, types in his password, watches the Web browser, goes to Sesamestreet.org and starts playing these little interactive games,” Johnson says.

Does this worry his father? It does not.

“He seems really into books,” Johnson says. “Being read books is a crucial part of his life.” And never mind that they read him “mainly programming manuals.”

Joke! That’s a joke. The man is pulling your leg. The kid is a huge Curious George fan.