Everything Bad Is Good for Who?
Steven Johnson coins the term “Sleeper Curve” in Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter to explain how, despite widespread disparagement particularly of video games and television, the average IQ score in the U.S. has gone up, and that screen media are responsible. He refers to Woody Allen’s 1973 film Sleeper, in which in one vignette, future scientists are incredulous that steak, foods fried in deep fat, and hot fudge were once considered to be unhealthy.
Johnson touts the empirical method and complex decisions that certain video and computer games reward, and lauds the layered plots of recent television series build and the “emotional IQ” that reality TV encourages. Like his arguments about gaming, Johnson’s arguments about television are also about new media and particularly how new media can deliver television shows for multiple viewings (for example, in DVD copies of an entire season) and allow maven-like discussion of them (for example, on blogs).
Overall, our classes found Johnson’s arguments to be compelling. Yet, when we wrote responses about what, whether new media or otherwise, gave us cognitive workouts, a notable pattern began to surface. Lots of things seem to make us smarter–to sharpen our skills at probing (empirical method), telescoping (the ability to execute nested sequences), emotional IQ, and the ability to follow complex plot sequences, often in which crucial information is missing. Among undergraduates in particular, it appeared that today’s twenty-somethings may read fewer books than previous generations–a fact that both Johnson and our classes of mostly teachers and English major and minors mourned–but that in addition to spending significant time playing video games, this generation seems to have spent significant time in lots of other IQ sharpening activities–soccer practice, music lessons, and so forth–with the coincident loss being perhaps in book reading time, and perhaps in unstructured activities overall.
While several class members acknowledged the benefits that that television and gaming have afforded them, the jury overall seems to question whether screen culture alone is responsible for our societal IQ increasing–if, in fact, the measure of that intelligence, IQ tests, is an accurate gauge.
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