The Sleeper Curve

After simultaneously watching the show House and reading the works of Johnson, the author of Everything Bad is Good for You, and is also a firm believer that video games, television internet, and movies are actually making us smarter. I have come to believe that Johnson’s argument of The Sleeper Curve is very much a strong argument and goes to prove the theory of his work in the show House. The show House brings great examples of what Johnson is trying to prove with The Sleeper Curve such as; multithreading, flashing arrows, reality effect, and social networks. House brings The Sleeper Curve alive and is definitely a “Johnson type” show.

House is a television medical drama series that airs on Fox TV. Dr. House is about a doctor that is a medical genius, who heads a team of doctors that are professional in different parts of the medical field. Dr. House isn’t like your normal diagnostician, he is addicted to Vicodin, insults his team, doesn’t obey the hospitals policies, and doesn’t care what his patients think of him. The show gains its popularity with Dr. House and the interesting illnesses of his patients. Many of the diseases on House are real and are treated just like reality doctors would. “Why love the character whose medicine we would in reality reject? Television is the fMRI of culture studies, the diagnostic by which we see beneath the platitudinous assumptions of social and professional promise to the pulsing realities beneath. Therein lies the show’s appeal.(The Left Atrium, CMAJ, 78.) What this is saying here is the way Dr. House does his work is nowhere near how it would actually be done in reality. As if these diagnoses were original or significant: or were easily solved in a day’s work.

Steven Johnson, author of Everything Bad is Good for You, believes that video games, movies, television, and the internet are actually making us smarter. This theory is called The Sleeper Curve. His theory for video games is that we use probing and telescoping. Probing is a person’s way of learning the game without a manual: going around and seeing what you can and cannot do. Telescoping is when you do something that gives you reward for what you have done: thus giving you the motivation to continue to play through the next level. Movies and television kind of go hand in hand. There are multithreading and flashing arrows, and social interactions, which lead us to have to think more and use more of a critical mind. The internet is an easy way of getting instant information: for example, if you didn’t understand an episode of House then you could look it up online and figure it out its complexity by reading fan sites. All of these media mediums are part of The Sleeper Curve and each one of them have a way of making us smarter.

One of Johnson’s examples of The Sleeper Curve would be multithreading. Multithreading is a strand of information in one scene, thus is possible to have up to 5 to 10 threads: making the complexity of the show harder to follow. In earlier television shows Johnson states shows like Starsky and Hutch or Dragnet and they only follow one or two stories and if you compare to that to any show up to date and you will see a great difference in the complexity of the recent show. Shows such as Starsky and Hutch and Dragnet make it fairly simple to follow the plot and figure out what exactly is going on. The plot begins and ends in each episode, having no follow up in any later episodes: whereas in House you have many multithreads that may leave you hanging and then will pick up on in a later episode. You follow many different kinds of threads and at the end they all come together at the end of an episode. It’s easy to prove The Sleeper Curve with multithreading because of its complexity it has on an audience. In Everything Bad is Good for You Johnson states “You can also measure the public’s willingness to tolerate more complicated narratives in the success of shows such as ER or 24 (Johnson 72).” In recent years, compared to shows that were made in the 60’s or 70’s, the recent shows have grown more complicated and more critical thinking to understand what is going on. House is definitely comparable to shows like ER or 24. House reaches far and beyond multithreading with at least 5 to 10 threads, making it challenging to keep up with an episode. Another supporting line from Johnson is “When we watch TV, we intuitively track narrative-threads-per-episode as a measure of a given show’s complexity. And all of the evidence suggests that this standard has been rising steadily over the past two decades. But multithreading is only part of the story. (Johnson, pg. 72)” I believe this makes perfect sense: with each popular show such as House, if you enjoy watching the concept of the series you are forced to work your brain to understand what is going on and make sense of the plot.

Another concept of how Johnson feels TV is making us work cognitively is what he terms “flashing arrows.” Flashing arrows are situations in a movie or television show that are made obvious by a particular camera shot or background music. This doesn’t happen in the show House, in my opinion they are more like hints instead: something may go wrong in the ER and the music will have a fast tempo and maybe have a patient whose heart is racing and as the doctor is working on them the camera focuses in on what the doctor had done wrong for a split second. The use of flashing arrows are mentioned in Everything Bad is Good for You where the authors says “works that have little use of this and require figuring things out yourself have a more deductive viewer base.” Nowadays, flashing arrows are used less and less because today’s shows are making us think more. More often than none, House will use something like flashing arrows, more like hints instead of actually making it obvious to the viewer.

Johnson also brings up social networking in his book. Social networking is a series of people that are related to one another: this is also known as character mapping. Character mapping is important because it lets you know who likes who, who doesn’t like who, and how they interact with one another. House has about 5 or 6 main character, all of which have a type of relationship with one another. For example Dr. House (a medical genius) and Dr. Cutty (House’s Boss) are always feuding about something but actually end up having a thing for each other. This brings confusion if you have just jumped into a random episode of a season: you would need to know certain things to understand the full concept, thus bringing complexity to the show. This type of character mapping is useful if you just jump into a later season and have no idea about the type of relationship Dr. House and Dr. Cutty have. Social networking in shows like House is growing complex, if a show has many characters, it’s important to know the relationship between the characters. House portrays limited characters and has many story lines between certain characters that are important to know.

To provide evidence to The Sleeper Curve, Johnson compares the plot complications between the 24 and the show Dallas, the prime time soap opera that was a popular show back in the early 1980’s. To make sense of an episode of 24, Johnson says “you have to integrate far more information than you would have a few decades ago watching a comparable show.” Also to keep up with shows like 24, you have to pay attention, make inferences, and track down social relationships. Johnson argues that today’s audiences would be “bored” watching a show like Dallas, because the show contains far less information in each scene. In the book “Media and Culture”, it talks about Johnson’s Sleeper Curve. The author explains The Sleeper Curve and goes on to agree with Johnson. He states that “you have to focus to follow the plot, and in focusing you’re exercising the parts of your brain that map social networks, that fill in missing information (Media and Culture, pg 20.)” Johnson argues that younger audiences today that are brought up in the Age of the Internet and in an era of complicated interactive visual games, brings high expectations to other kinds of popular culture as well, including television. “The mind likes to be challenged; there’s real pleasure to be found in solving puzzles, detecting patterns or unpacking a complex narrative (Johnson, Everything Bad is Good for You.)

Overall, I believe House is a “Johnson type” show, and his theory of The Sleeper Curve is supported with examples of how House uses them and makes us smarter. House is a complex show and we wouldn’t know it was making us smarter because of the silent Sleeper Curve. People who do watch the show aren’t really even realizing their learning until someone brings up the theory and actually understand how it works. “The season story-arcs in House serve as bonuses to the fans, who watch the show religiously, but for the most part it follows the same procedure as most medical and cop dramas and you need no familiarity with the show to jump right in. It may be a little harder to get the Lupus references, but even the dialogue on the show vacillates so frequently between proverbial and medical terminology that you won't even realize you're learning something until you randomly find yourself thinking about EKGs (Jossip.) If you watch House long enough, you can find yourself understanding medical terms because their used so frequently in the show and can actually become detectives along with the doctors. Again, I believe Johnson has a great grasp on the theory and everything from such shows as House, prove all of his examples right: The Sleeper Curve is working but in its own cognitive way.

Works Cited

CMAJ. "The Left Artrium." Canadian Medical Association of its Licences (2008): 3.

Johnson, Steven. Everything Bad Is Good For You. New York City: The Berkley Publishing Company, 2005.

Jossip. 2009. 25 May 2009 .

Richard Cambell, Christopher R. Martin, Bettina Fabos. Media and Culture: An Introduction To Mass Communication. Boston/New York: Bedfore/St.Martins, 2009.