It is a popular, to say in the least, belief that the media, in the forms of TV, video games and the internet, is slowly devouring our souls. We are supposedly becoming mindless zombies in the wake of the media’s destruction, slowly being victimized by Spongebob’s stupidity; all of us as members of a Hell that we are in control of.
However widespread this idea is, there are those that have risen against these beliefs. The sleeper curve is described by Steven Johnson, the author of Everything Bad Is Good For You, as being different mediums, like video games and television, that are actually healthy for the human brain to consume (Johnson 9). This sleeper curve idea holds true in many different cases. Recent television shows require much thinking on the viewer’s part.
Johnson mentions the show 24 as a good example of a show that is complicated enough that viewers must think twice about some things (Johnson 109). He uses 24 when he talks about social networks, also known as character mapping. Character mapping is how characters interact with each other, and who they interact with (Johnson 107). The character mapping of recent years, especially 24, is much more complicated than the maps of Dallas (Johnson 110). The constant interaction between characters forces viewers to think, putting characters together with other characters like pieces of a puzzle, and therefore stimulating our brains intellectually.
For video games, Johnson mentions probing; probing is when the person playing the game has to explore their environment, hoping to figure out what their next step is or a clue as what to do in the first place (Johnson 45). The steps for probing are probing, then the player making a hypothesis about what to do next; the player reprobes with the hypothesis, and then rethinks their original hypothesis (Johnson 45). This also causes the player’s brain to tick, having to figure things out on their own instead of the answers to their questions being handed to them on a silver platter. Johnson has taken the obvious and written it down in a book: ask any random person to play a level of Final Fantasy and then ask them if it was difficult. They will tell you yes, unless they are a genius. Any regular person would struggle with a level they have never seen before, especially if they have never interacted with a game like those from the Final Fantasy series. Games are difficult and do make us think.
Johnson has hypothesized that even though our culture has more than a daily doses’ worth of media on a regular basis, we are not losing intelligence because of that. Johnson has put into simple words what most people are slowly realizing: the media with interact with regularly has evolved into something much more difficult than what it was to begin with.
This is a great response and it covers two of the 4 aspects which we talked about. It would be hard to include everything we talked about in a short review.
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