Case Study

CASE STUDY

The Sleeper Curve

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In the 1973 science fiction comedy movie Sleeper, the film’s director, Woody Allen, plays a character who reawakens two hundred years after being cryogenically frozen (after a routine ulcer operation had gone bad). The scientists who “unfreeze” Allen discuss how back in the 1970s people actually believed that “deep fat fried foods,” “steaks,” “cream pies,” and “hot fudge” were unhealthy. But apparently in 2173 those food items will be good for us.

In his 2005 book, Everything Bad Is Good for You, Steven Johnson makes a controversial argument about TV and culture based on the movie. He calls his idea the “Sleeper Curve” and claims that “today’s popular culture is actually making us smarter.”1 Johnson’s ideas run counter to those of many critics who worry about popular culture and its potentially disastrous effects, particularly on young people. An influential argument in this strain of thinking appeared nearly thirty years ago in Neil Postman’s 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves to Death. Postman argued that we were moving from the “Age of Typology” to the “Age of Television,” from the “Age of Exposition” to the “Age of Show Business.”2 Postman worried that an image-centered culture had overtaken words and a print-oriented culture, resulting in “all public discourse increasingly tak[ing] the form of entertainment.” He pointed to the impact of advertising and how “American businessmen discovered, long before the rest of us, that the quality and usefulness of their goods are subordinate to the artifice of their display.”3 For Postman, image making has become central to choosing our government leaders, including the way politicians are branded and packaged as commodity goods in political ads. Postman argued that the TV ad has become the “chief instrument” for presenting political ideas, with these results: “that short simple messages are preferable to long and complex ones; that drama is to be preferred over exposition; that being sold solutions is better than being confronted with questions about problems.”4

Across the converged cultural landscape, we are somewhere between the Age of Television and the Age of the Internet. So Johnson’s argument offers an opportunity to assess where our visual culture has taken us. According to Johnson, “For decades, we’ve worked under the assumption that mass culture follows a path declining steadily toward lowest-common-denominator standards, presumably because the ‘masses’ want dumb, simple pleasures and big media companies try to give the masses what they want. But, the exact opposite is happening: the culture is getting more cognitively demanding, not less.”5 While Johnson shares many of Postman’s 1985 concerns, he disagrees with the point from Amusing Ourselves to Death that image-saturated media are only about “simple” messages and “trivial” culture. Instead, Johnson discusses the complexity of video and computer games and many of TV’s dramatic prime-time series, especially when compared with less demanding TV programming from the 1970s and early 1980s.

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DALLAS (1978–1991)
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As evidence, Johnson compares the plot complications of Fox’s CIA/secret agent thriller 24 with Dallas, the prime-time soap opera that was America’s most popular TV show in the early 1980s. “To make sense of an episode of 24,” Johnson maintains, “you have to integrate far more information than you would have a few decades ago watching a comparable show. Beneath the violence and the ethnic stereotypes, another trend appears: To keep up with entertainment like 24, you have to pay attention, make inferences, track shifting social relationships.” Johnson argues that today’s audience would be “bored” watching a show like Dallas, in part “because the show contains far less information in each scene, despite the fact that its soap-opera structure made it one of the most complicated narratives on television in its prime. With Dallas, the modern viewer doesn’t have to think to make sense of what’s going on, and not having to think is boring.”

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MAD MEN (2007–)

In addition to 24, a number of contemporary programs offer complex narratives, including Mad Men, Breaking Bad, True Blood, Dexter, Game of Thrones, The Good Wife, Revolution, The Newsroom, and Girls. Johnson says that in contrast to older popular programs like Dallas or Dynasty, the best TV storytelling today layers “each scene with a thick network of affiliations. 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, that connect multiple narrative threads.” Johnson argues that younger audiences today—brought up in the Age of the Internet and in an era of complicated interactive visual games—bring high expectations to other kinds of popular culture as well, including television. “The mind,” Johnson writes, “likes to be challenged; there’s real pleasure to be found in solving puzzles, detecting patterns or unpacking a complex narrative system.”

In countering the cultural fears expressed by critics like Postman and by many parents trying to make sense of the intricate media world that their children encounter each day, Johnson sees a hopeful sign: “I believe that the Sleeper Curve is the single most important new force altering the mental development of young people today, and I believe it is largely a force for good: enhancing our cognitive faculties, not dumbing them down. And yet you almost never hear this story in popular accounts of today’s media.”

Steven Johnson’s theory is one of many about media impact on the way we live and learn. Do you accept Johnson’s Sleeper Curve argument that certain TV programs—along with challenging interactive video and computer games—are intellectually demanding and are actually making us smarter? Why or why not? Are you more persuaded by Postman’s 1985 account—that the word has been displaced by an image-centered culture and, consequently, that popular culture has been dumbed down by its oversimplification and visual triviality? As you consider Postman, think about the Internet: Is it word based or image based? What kinds of opportunities for learning does it offer?

In thinking about both the 1985 and 2005 arguments by Postman and Johnson, consider as well generational differences. Do you enjoy TV shows and video games that your parents or grandparents don’t understand? What types of stories and games do they enjoy? What did earlier generations value in storytelling, and what is similar and dissimilar about storytelling today? Interview someone who is close to you—but from an earlier generation—about media and story preferences. Then discuss or write about both the common ground and the cultural differences that you discovered. image