Marc Tuters

Johnson argues against what he calls the "zeitgeist" school of cultural criticism. He sees his work "is to diagram those forces, not decode them". The position somewhat reminscent of Susan Sontag in her famous essay Against Interpretation where she stated: "Whatever it may have been in the past, the idea of content is today mainly a hindrance"

To the popular claim made by conservatives and liberal democrats alike (such as Hilary Clinton and Joseph Lieberman) that contemporary pop culture is representative of a decline in family values, he states that it "may not be showing us the righteous path. But it is making us smarter" (14), noting, that while no clear consensus has been achieved in the many studies that have attempted to link video games with violence, recent studies on the effects of playing video games suggest a positive impact on gamers visual intelligence and memory.

The first section of the book makes an impassioned argument for taking games seriously. He sees games as involving two types of intellectual labor that he calls "probing and telescoping" siting game scholar James Glee (45) he defines probing as cybernetic process of exploring the limits of a game's internal physics. this process forces players to speculate on the construction of the mechanics underlying the simulation..

Johnson uses the term telescoping to refer to the labour essential to any modern game, of managing multiple objectives nested at different levels (54). To the scheptics who see games simply as flashy MTV graphics, he states "It's not about tolerating or aesthicising chaos; it's about finding order and meaning in the world and making decisions that help create that order." (50?) Here he displaces the assumed central importance of narrative to game play stating "playing a video game generates a sequence of events that retorspectively sketch out a narrative., but the pleasures and challenges of playing don't equate with the pleasures of following a story."(55) Johnson believes the closest analog to how gamers jump between high and low levels in their thinking is, in fact, the work of the programmer.

Johnson also looks at how television has become more complex in the past years. For Johnson, as for many TV critics, the mid-80's Steve Botchko show Hill Street Blues signifies an initial change of television narratology from relatively simple stories to the vastly multithreaded narratives of current shows like the Sopranos. He observes that by the measure of shows 25 years ago, "popular television has never been harder to follow" (74). In the interim, according to Johnson, our analytic skills as viewers have substantially increased.

To illustrate the difference in contemporary viewing styles he sites the West Wing adds "texture" to its stories by withholding key information from viewers, or how ER intersperses dialogue with highly technical jargon that viewers can not be expected to understand. Johnson understands these examples of what he calls "planned ambiguity", mental hurdles for viewers to clear in order to enjoy the narrative. He partially attributes this increase in the complexity of plots to the syndication, which didn't exist prior to the 80's. In the ecosystem which syndication brought about, shows prosper only when they can sustain multiple viewings without becoming tedious. (159) On a related note, he quotes screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, who states "I try to infuse my screenplays with enough information that upon repeated viewings you can have a different experience (164)." Somewhat amusingly, he brings up the idea eternal recurrance as a kind of design principle for syndication (the notion of eternal recurrance was proposed by Nietzsche as a kind of alternative myth to that of Christian morality in which are lives are to be repeated to infinity, a pop-culture reference to which might be the Grounhog Day).

Johnson even has generous things to say of reality programming, which he sees as exercising viewer's minds, through the intellectual labor of probing the "reality" presented in these programs for weak spots in the system. "The pleasure in these shows comes not from watching other human beings humiliated on national television; it comes from depositing other human beings in a complex, high-stakjes environment where no established strategies exist., and watching them find their bearings." (94) "the unique cocktail that the reality games serves up --real people, evolving rule systems, and emotional intimacy-- prods the mind into action." (107) Once again for Johnson, as with games, states that the content is much less intersting here than what he calls the "collateral leaning" that takes place through the cognitive labour of probing the system. The final part of the first section of the book focusses on the Internet, in which Johnson states "(t)he rise of the Internet has challenged our minds in three fundamental and related ways: by virtue of being participatory, by forcing users to learn new interfaces, and by creating new channels for interaction" (118).

The second section of the book focusses on broader cultural tendencies first looking at standardized test scoring. Here Johnson consolidates his argument from the first sections on gaming television and the Internet to make the claim that we are, as a culture getting smarter. Here he discusses the so called Flynn effect, according to which IQ scores have been steadily rising for the past 30 years, a trend which largely went unnoticed "because the IQ establishment routinely normalized their test results to ensure that people of normal intelligence scored 100 on the test" (140). Johnson argues that this collective cognitive update comes neither from improved nutrition or education, but rather the cognitive labor children are regularly exposed to in the form of popular culture.

While he introduces the book by talking about his childhood experience with a paper-based baseball simulation, he essentially ignores actual baseball. Surely something positive could be said of fan's abilities to memorize statistics, or perhaps the communal experience of watching the big-game, as one of the last remaining instances of a cultural phenomenon capable of breaking out of the prevailing tendency toward niche markets. Another criticism of Johnson's lauding of popular culture might be the following. While it seems irrefutable that games, for instance, have positive elements, what might be called an ecological approach media exposure might consider the amount of time spent in game, perhaps finding gamers to be involved in a kind of massive mono-culturing experiment. Nowhere is this argument made more strongly then when we consider the limitations that games impose in terms of their physical environments. While a platform like the new Nintendo Wii is recieving much attention for expanding haptic interaction from thumb-pressing to now flicking the wrist, as embodied subjects we are never-the-less capable of so much more in terms of interaction.

In conclusion Johnson asks us throw out the old mass-culture critique, playfully suggesting that we imagine the situation now as one in which the soma and feelies, of Huxley's Brave New World in fact make us smarter, rather then controlling us. While I think it's still important to teach people to understand what Adorno called the "culture industries" as ideological systems. here I would site the recent flap over the depiction of torture on the Fox TV show 24. According the article in the New Yorker, people form impressions of phenomonae with which they have no prior experience in part through their depiction within media. Their approach, which Johnson might have characterized as being from the "effects school", is none the less an important alternate voice that I believe we should not overlook in embracing everything that is bad for us.