Published Spring 2006
 
Reading the Contemporary Mind
(on Steven Johnson, Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's
Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter [Riverhead Books,
2005])
Richard Powers' 1995 novel, Galatea 2.2, asks whether it is possible for a computer to simulate a literary critic. In trying to answer that question Powers explains what a book does to a brain, exploring the multiple calculations a brain makes to understand a simple metaphor or how a line of poetry creates meaning through association or repetition of a phrase or sound. He illustrates two reasons why close reading remains a compelling technique for understanding literature: it explicates an author's means of processing language within a short passage of a text and it simultaneously explores how the reader's mind can keep up with and make sense of those progressions through its own complex mechanisms for guessing at connectivity. As the novel's central character (also named) Richard Powers uses increasingly sophisticated machines to develop systems to understand how language functions (named "Implementation A" through "Helen") his ability to explain the thinking process improves—primarily through recognizing his computers' missteps in learning. The result is a novel about the distance between systems of understanding and actual knowledge. As close as Powers comes to explaining how learning occurs, especially though the process of reading, the novel adds rather than takes away from the mystery of what the good literary critic is able to accomplish in exploring and explaining any text at all.
Ten years later, Steven Johnson's Everything Bad is Good for You has a more specific goal in mind—to explain how popular culture is making people smarter—but his interest in how the contemporary mind creates (and improves on) systems for problem-solving covers similar territory as Powers' novel. Johnson claims that new technologies such as video games develop the mind the way reading once did. Johnson simply replaces the relationship between a book and a brain with more recent technological tools—the new "books" are primarily video games, television shows, and the Internet. Although twentieth-century educators argue that reading anything at all is good for the brain, when novels first emerged as a new form the cultural argument that developed around them was more similar to what it is now for video games—an argument that the subject matter of a particular book was dangerous, more dangerous than not reading it at all. Mary Wollstonecraft famously staked out her early feminist territory by going against this view and asserting that the act of reading was much more important than exactly what was being read, suggesting that the act of participating in an intellectual world—even a fictional world—was a necessary step in the process of becoming educated. She wrote that "any kind of reading I think better than leaving a blank still a blank, because the mind must receive a degree of enlargement and obtain a little strength by a slight exertion of its thinking powers" (A Vindication of the Rights of Women 184). Ian Watt first charted the development of these early debates about reading as part of the development of the novel as a new literary form in The Rise of the Novel (1957).
Johnson contends, as Wollstonecraft did for different reasons, that greater complexity, in whatever form it appears, is necessary for brains to continue to grow. Johnson explains that "these other forms of culture have intellectual or cognitive virtues in their own right—different from, but comparable to, the rewards of reading" (22). In the current market, Johnson finds complexity developing generally at a faster rate in the video game industry than in the book industry. Although he never makes this point outright, Johnson's examples of "great books"—that is, suitably complex works—are always older canonical works such as Moby Dick. He does not offer many examples of very recent novels, poetry, or (perhaps more likely) performance art that he feels might be more complex than what has come before (perhaps as a result of the author's access to technology) or are complex because the authors actually incorporate some of the elements of those new technologies into their poems, plays, or novels (a good example of this might be a recent production of the Wooster Group's House/Lights that uses text from Gertrude Stein's Dr. Faustus Lights the Lights, music and plot from a B Movie from the 60s, video imaging, and voice distortion).
For Johnson the good news is that access to complexity is increasing. There are more complicated television shows and difficult games on the market. Johnson examines "what complexity looks like" (65): a greater number of storylines occurring simultaneously, less introduction or repetition within a story to orient viewers, and more characters with interrelated histories to keep track of within any one game or show. Johnson is not interested in these innovations because they alter plots or narratives; rather, he advises that "it's crucial here not to ask what's happening in the gameworld, but rather what's happening to the players mentally: what problems they are actively working on, what objectives they're trying to achieve" (48). That is, "it's not what you're thinking about when you're playing a game, it's the way you're thinking that matters" (40). This distinction is central to Johnson's overall point that using more complex software changes the speed and ability through which people recognize new patterns that they can then use to teach themselves to learn other things.
Johnson's learning curve is akin to Powers' recognition that "knowledge about knowledge" (Powers 114) is a sophisticated step in learning how to learn more quickly. Johnson calls this same idea the process of "telescoping"—a process that gamers are becoming increasingly adept at implementing. He writes that "we do probe new environments for hidden rules and patterns; we do build telescoping hierarchies of objectives that govern our lives on both micro and macro time frames" (56). He defines telescoping further:
If telescoping involves a sequence, by the same token the feeling it conjures in the brain is not, I think, a narrative feeling…In a sense, the closest analog to the way gamers are thinking is the way programmers think when they write code: a nested series of instructions with multiple layers, some focused on the basic tasks of getting information in and out of memory, some focused on higher-level functions like how to represent the program's activity to the user. (55)
One of the ways that gamers build on these explanations for how to play games is by creating free "game guides" for products which they then post on the web and share (30). These guides provide intricate systems for navigating the complicated games and are produced entirely out of intellectual interest and not for any monetary or other self-interested purposes. What these shared guides tell us, however, is that the new systems people create to navigate difficult narratives are also becoming more sophisticated as they proliferate and become more accessible. Game guides are an example of "pure problem-solving" (144) because they represent an organized, systemized, and shared explanation (and often one of many) for how a game works best. Game guides are critiqued informally in chat groups and by users creating even more "knowledge about knowledge."
Johnson suggests that as access to complexity increases, tolerance for complexity is also increasing. For example, he explains that "when the idea of hypertext documents first entered the popular domain in the early nineties, it was a distinctly avant-garde idea, promoted by an experimentalist literary fringe looking to explode the restrictions of the linear sentence and the page-bound book. Fast forward less than a decade, and something extraordinary occurs: exploring nonlinear document structures becomes as second nature as dialing a phone" (117). As optimistic as Johnson is about the degree to which the general comfort with more complex technologies has increased in games and television, I have not necessarily found that this tolerance for complexity translates into the classroom. More students do not seem to find Gertrude Stein or William Faulkner easier to read than they found it, by comparison, five years ago. They do not seem to have a greater tolerance for nonlinear narratives or books that require the equivalent of a "game guide" in order to navigate them, nor are they interested in writing these kinds of guides for certain books. (Though, perhaps, Oprah Winfrey's recent choice to make three of Faulkner's novels summer reading supports Johnson's idea that the public's tolerance for complexity is extending to difficult books as well.)
On the television front, Johnson sees the popularity of 24 as proof that the viewing public is much more interested by recent difficult shows than older easier ones. A recent New York Times television review made a similar argument, comparing HBO's current series Entourage positively to its older model television show, Sex and the City, arguing that the new show was more sophisticated and intelligent in every way, exhibiting the growing maturity of HBO television and its audience. Still, this tolerance might only improve shows and games that easily reach a large population of viewers. Individuals seem to be less interested in complexity than groups who can together explore (and unravel) the difficulties of a shared interest. Johnson also considers that this desire for complexity from a mass viewing public has a historical and economic explanation—a contemporary need for works that are capable of worthwhile repetition. Since television shows make money from syndication, movies and television from DVD sales and games that draw on their stories, new shows and games need to hold people's interests on repeated viewings in order to survive in a competitive and crowded market. Johnson argues that this economic need has translated into an intellectual one: "as the shows have complexified, the resources for making sense of that complexity have multiplied as well. If you're lost in 24's social network, you can always get your bearings online" (116). Certainly the speed at which you can analyze television shows and games and share your analysis of those works with others will make more people interested in staying with something they do not understand.
The weakness in Johnson's book is perhaps its lack of connection with the still powerful mystery behind learning that charges Powers' novel. Johnson's contemporary mind, as is Powers', is a system-making space, but Powers is moved by the fact that the process by which a brain creates a system to understand what it doesn't know is still outside the realm of simulation. Powers' explanation for the computer's learning process is complicated by the difficulty of describing how the human brain creates patterns and associations—that is, how it learns:
F's search for an answer space scurried its component neurodes into knowing. Like players in a marching band, the invisible punners shimmered, cut their series of Brownian turns on the turf, and, in abrupt about-face, conjoined themselves into further story. Every word in that story was double-voiced. Every act of depicting depicted itself, as read by some other set of overlapping signal lights…Learning meant consolidating, closing in on its contour the way a drop of water minimizes into a globe. Weights rearranged. (Powers 155)
Just as Powers demonstrates that each successive generation of computer more accurately explores and explains complex materials, Johnson supports his claims that the average citizen has a much better problem-solving brain than he had one hundred years ago with solid evidence from I.Q. tests that measure "the subject's ability to see patterns and complete sequences" (147). Powers is not as interested in solutions as in new processes for thinking produced by the new machines; Johnson is more interested in showing that these processes have improved than in showing what new ideas they can now generate. Both texts are interested in the relationship between science and the humanities, but Powers' sense that science needs the humanities (because the limits of science preclude explaining what the good literary critic accomplishes) seems still (after ten years) more sophisticated than Johnson's interest in showing that scientists and humanists use their brains in essentially similar ways. Powers' exploration of what we do not still understand about the intricacies of a brain's complex reaction to the way language (or a visual image) triggers memory as a step in the learning process lends it a complexity that Johnson's positive focus on "problem-solving" lacks. Despite ever-increasing abilities to map the human brain, there is still a great deal that we do not know. Johnson's previous book, Mind Wide Open (2004), where he subjected himself to a battery of tests to map his brain, suggested more clearly than his current one how much more work is necessary in order to understand the ways that brains learn and the patterns and systems that they create to understand. He admits this at one point when he writes that "if you're trying to make sense of a new cultural form's effect on the way we view the world, you need to be able to describe the cultural object in some detail, and also demonstrate how that object transforms the mind that is apprehending it" (34). Johnson's text does not go further than a work such as Powers' novel did ten years ago except to suggest that the technology for doing what Powers was trying to do is that much closer to being discovered.
Current work in science and technology has always played a small role in literary criticism, but recent texts suggest that Powers' and Johnson's interests in questions of cognition are developing within literary criticism as well. While using chaos theory to unlock literary texts became a brief fad in the mid-90s in such works as works N. Katherine Hayles' Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science (1990), Harriet Hawkins's Strange Attractors: Literature, Culture and Chaos Theory (1995), or Kevin Boon's Chaos Theory and the Interpretation of Literary Texts (1997), more recent critical works suggest a trend toward exploring the kinds of general questions Powers and now Johnson are asking about learning. Johnson studied English literature in college and worked on Brown University's early hypertext projects, but his book does not advocate for new ways to use scientific theories to unlock readings of specific authors; rather, he is more interested in understanding how a better dialogue can be generated by recognizing the similarities between science and the humanities. A few new works of literary criticism suggest that there has been a turn in literary criticism towards this more general interest in cognition and contemporary writers. Recent texts include Joseph Tabbi's Cognitive Fictions (2002) and Alan Richardson and Ellen Spolsky's edited volume Work of Fiction: Cognition, Culture, and Complexity (2004).
Johnson advocates that a new dialogue develop among science, technology, culture, and literature merging different vocabularies for talking about related ideas. While "cognitive studies" seems to fit part of what Johnson discusses and "cultural studies" another part, he recognizes that "cognitive studies," as currently defined academically, precludes his particular interest in culture and "cultural studies" has embraced certain forms of popular culture faster than others. Films, for example, science fiction novels, and comics (graphic novels) have been embraced by academia more quickly than video games have been. Though Johnson directs his book at a general audience (even the small size of the book and the large typeface advertise that it is more interested in seeking a general audience than an academic one) he is advocating for a more revolutionary shift in what currently constitutes academic disciplines and what ought to be studied in a university. He critiques academia, particularly the humanities, for lagging behind the times. The same "cultural authority" (134) that took too long to recognize Charles Dickens's novels because of their popularity is too slow to recognize video games, the Internet, and other forms of popular writing and narration as cultural tools. Johnson writes:
Google is our culture's principal way of knowing about itself… tools like Google have fulfilled the original dream of digital machines becoming extensions of our memory, but the new social networking applications have done something that the visionaries never imagined: they are augmenting our people skills as well, widening our social networks, and creating new possibilities for strangers to share ideas and experiences. (121-24)
Despite Johnson's anxieties, these subjects are quickly working their way into academic discourse. Recent examples include the popularity of Clay Shirky's "Ontology is Overrated" lecture (downloadable at www.itconversations.com), articles in The New York Times business section on economists studying online dating websites ("Economic Scene: Online Dating? Thin and Rich Works Here, Too" 30 June 2005), articles in The New Yorker ("Ring My Bell: The Expensive Pleasures of the Ringtone" 7 March 2005) and The New York Times Arts section ("The Nokia Fugue in G Major" 10 July 2005) about ring-tones, a new column in The New York Times technology section that reviews web sites, and interdisciplinary technology pieces, such as two recent Times articles, "Bill Gates as an Anthropologist" (25 June 2005), and "A Neuron With Halle Berry's Name on It" (5 July 2005). All of these pieces suggest that the boundaries between disciplines, between what has traditionally been viewed as high and low culture, between what is considered a scientific or a humanistic idea, an academic or a nonacademic one are all becoming, as Johnson hopes, increasingly fluid.
Johnson's book, currently ranked #961 on Amazon.com (as of July 2005) is one of a cluster of popular texts that have recently emerged challenging traditional ways of thinking about popular culture and suggesting new meeting points for the humanities, popular culture, and science. Steven D. Levitt's Freakonomics (#4), Malcolm Gladwell's Blink (#13) and The Tipping Point (#21), Daniel Pink's A Whole New Mind (#464), and Jeff Hawkins's On Intelligence (#1174)—all of which emerged in the last three years—suggest the consumer hunger for new ways of defining intelligence through adaptation to new kinds of technological systems generally widely available. The popularity of these texts also provides a kind of collective response to the Reading at Risk (2004) report from the National Endowment for the Arts, a document emphasizing the dire situation caused by a drop in the American reading public. In Dana Gioia's preface to the report, he directly pits the positive effects of reading against the less positive effects of electronic media which, according to the report, not only steal readers, but "make fewer demands on their audiences, and indeed often require no more than passive participation" (Reading at Risk vii). The anxious tone of the document is explained by the connection Gioia makes between readers and those who are active in the community, suggesting that a loss of a reading public will result in a commensurate loss of a sense of individual responsibility. Johnson's book cleverly opposes this argument by using as a chapter epigraph Marshall McLuhan's famous observation that "the student of media soon comes to expect the new media of any period whatever to be classed as pseudo by those who acquired the patterns of earlier media, whatever they may happen to be." Though Johnson's text exposes the NEA report as an updated version of an old cliché, his book also answers the report by employing similar graphs, charts, and statistics, but to opposite effect: to show the kind of active participation and examples of the level of concentration and focus necessary to play certain video and computer games. Johnson's book, however, occasionally succumbs to the same vagueness with which the report, despite its graphs, charts and statistics, ought to be charged. The fault of the report is that despite its seemingly specific critiques of current modes of learning it does not know exactly what happens to a brain when reading; instead, it has to rely on a series of contextual explanations for what happens if people don't read. Johnson's book is also a little bit vague about what the improved "problem-solving" abilities of gamers might actually look like and accomplish. Although Johnson doesn't say exactly what problems people are now going to be able to solve as a result of their higher intelligence, he does suggest that no form of complexity will remain off-limits as technology, at the very least, makes people more aware of how they use their own brains. To his credit he never discounts reading, but rather makes the more generally acceptable argument that no form of increased complexity ought to be discounted if it helps people to learn. The seemingly odd trio of Moby Dick, 24, and the game SimCity become, for Johnson, simply three forms of complexity requiring surprisingly similar kinds of attention and leading to unexpected insights into memory, identity, and the process of understanding experience.
Powers' novel, however, still comes closest to explaining why the process of learning matters. By the end of his novel, Powers reveals that by teaching the computer how to read, the character Richard Powers really learns what it means to read and to understand. The space between the development of systems of understanding and actual knowledge is, while still mysterious, at least beginning to clarify. If the NEA wants to make a more convincing case for the argument that what a book does to a brain is better than what a complicated electronic game does to it, it will need to complete Powers' experiment and prove that reading leads to actual knowledge faster (and better) than other technologies that also create systems of understanding. Johnson's text wagers that not only won't the NEA win the bet, but gamers will likely successfully complete Powers' experiment first.
* * * Works Cited
Johnson, Stephen. Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life. New York: Scribner, 2004.
National Endowment for the Arts. Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America (Research Division Report #46). June 2004. Http://www.nea.gov/pub/ReadingatRick.pdf.
Powers, Richard. Galatea 2.2. New York: Harper Perennial, 1995.
Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. London: Chatto & Windus, 1957.
Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Women. Ed. Carol H. Poston. New York: Norton Critical, 1988. |
