Kammen's point about the desire for authenticity is interesting. In the text he states that a person wants authenticity “reality or illusion – as a means of avoiding ambiguities inherent in blurred lines between fiction and nonfiction” (240). Kammen is referring to documentaries, particularly those by Ken Burns. But this desire for authenticity is applicable to other arenas of culture. Particularly, this is seems highly applicable especially in the case of literary nonfiction. James Frey's A Million Little Pieces would arguably be the most evident case. The story is well known by now, after elements of the narrative were revealed to be fabricated there was a massive backlash. The backlash stemmed from the narratives inauthenticity. But was the backlash from the public? That point strikes me as debatable. The book is still stocked in book stores, in the memoir/biography/autobiography section no less. The outcry was from Oprah, who as Kammen himself stated is a new form of the public intellectual.

I know I haven't stopped talking about music all semester, but this is the final time. As it seems to me, the place where the line of argument surrounding authentic vs. inauthentic is in music. Why are there so many revisionist arguments against Elvis? Because he usurped African-American music and put it into a white context, that's not authentic. The same goes for Led Zeppelin who made a career out of stealing blues riffs. The same authentic vs. inauthentic argument could be applied to the same band. The Clash serves as a really good example of this. Their first four records are held in relatively high critical esteem. By the time the fifth record, Combat Rock was released they were sell outs who played at Shea Stadium. But that doesn't mean that these artists didn't sell these inauthentic records. It's an intellectual debate for audiophiles. It seems that there's an incredibly fine line between what we, as scholars, intellectuals and critics, perceive as authentic and what the general populace perceives to be authentic. However, I do not think that it is a complete disconnect. I do not think that anyone would argue the authenticity of blues, jazz, folk or even gospel.

Kammen

Thus far I really like Kammen’s style. His arguments feel bold without seeming overworked. I think the writing is pretty accessible (absence of LCS terms, b/c he is a historian). He also seems to have a gift for effortlessly, seamlessly packing loads of information into a few paragraphs. I also like all the little anecdotes – they are fun to read, give life to his claims.

And although I liked his attempt to distinguish mass culture from popular culture, Kammen does not seem to acknowledge that the definitions he sets forth are his working, personal definitions and are not necessarily universally accepted throughout history/cultural studies. But I do like his historical explanations for his defining these terms as such. It always shocks me that authors devote so much space to debating the definitions of such terms; what is the point? (Not that I think Kammen does so – I am jus going off on my own tangent).

And overall I do agree with his ideas. I can buy his linking the emergence of popular/mass culture (now I am not sure which one it is) with the democratization of art and entertainment. One thing I do not agree with/understand: Kammen places avant-garde art in with other democratizing artistic forces (the anecdote about the theater in the second chapter). I am just not sure that agree with the particular categorization. Especially when taken in its ‘60s context, the avant-garde seems like a niche to me.

Thoughts on Kammen

In section three in the fourth chapter “The Pivotal Decade: The 1930s” Kammen argues that the 1930’s was an important decade because it was the last time that popular culture was the main feature of American society (83). According to Kammen, during the Great Depression people read more by borrowing books more frequently from public libraries. Book clubs also became more popular, while people also enjoyed a wide variety of cheap pulp magazines. He lists other activities such as gardening, and the formation of gardening clubs among women, jigsaw puzzles, bingo, Monopoly, Bridge, roller-skating, bicycling, dancing, craft clubs, theatre groups, etc. (83-85). In a decade that is usually associated with tumultuous upheaval, instability, and mass migration, Kammen presents popular amusements enjoyed by people at home. His evidence seems to support an attachment to place that is comfortable and stable.

For people to enjoy these kinds of leisure, they didn’t need to travel much. According to Mike Steiner, an expert in regionalism and folk culture, the majority of Americans moved less, and the flow of people from rural to urban areas slowed and actually reversed itself for the first time in American history (Steiner, 442) Steiner writes in his article “Regionalism in the Great Depression,” Demographic evidence and folk testimony confirmed that the traditional promise of mobility deferred to an attachment to place during the depression” (442). Contrary to the image of anxiety, displacement, and dislocation that dominates our historical imagination of the 30’s, the 1930’s, as Kammen quotes Warren Susman, was the “the decade of participation and belonging” (84).

Matt Nelson

I think Kammen offers a surprising and rather important corrective to the way in which we often think about culture. In the text he points that we often consider the dissemination of culture to be a top down process, but in reality it is often just the opposite: filter up.

Coming from a traditional literary studies background, my understanding of the canon and its acquisition of works was just the way Kammen described it, top down. But if one stops and thinks about the way culture functions, the filter up model makes sense in a number of situations.

In American Culture, American Tastes Kammen points to the examples of Tin Pan Alley and Jazz. Both forms of music are thoroughly entrenched within our conception of (high) culture. As a knee jerk reaction, we would assume that their acceptance within the upper echelon of culture would be the result of a top down process. But, the reality is that their status is a result of filter up, as Kammen rightly points out.

The dissemination of culture through a filter up process is not unique if one thinks about it. The example of street art readily comes to mind. Throughout the '80s and '90s graffiti artists such a Shepard Fairey and Banksy were viewed at best as vandals and at worst outlaws. Even the language used to refer to these artists reflects their assimilation and ascent into higher strata of the cultural sphere. No longer are Banksy and Fairey graffiti writers, they are Street artists. Also, they venue for their art has changed. No longer are their pieces found on walls, alleys, billboards, parking meters, etc. Instead, their pieces are housed in “proper” art galleries. In 2002 Banksy art appeared in a gallery in Los Angeles. Fairey's art was used during Obama's bid for presidency in the 2008 presidential election. More recently Fairey's art was featured at the Warhol Museum right here in Pittsburgh. From the street to the gallery, clearly, this is a rather astute example of the filter up process Kammen is describing.

There are countless other examples one can point to of this filter up process. From Bob Dylan, to Punk the process of cultural dissemination through a filter up process is one that can be pinpointed. I It seems that thinking of culture in terms of this filter up method is often overlooked. Yet, such a methodology allows one to see a culture in a new and valuable way. This understanding could be particularly useful in thinking of how the status of a given cultural object can shift from high to middle to low (another phenomenon Kammen points to). In such a situation it seems as if there would be an apparent tension between the critical appropriation and the filter up process. One would have to question which method of dissemination or appropriation would be at play and at what strength.

Keep The Arts in Public Schools!!!

“My sense of order restored, my appreciation of the arcane ways of American cultural possibility was vastly extended. The men were products of both past and present; were both coal heavers and Met extras; were both workingmen and opera buffs. Seen in the clear, pluralistic, melting-pot light of American cultural possibility, there was no contradiction."
Ralph Ellison, "The Little Man at Chewhaw Station"


For my final blog of the semester, I thought I would resort back to using intriguing quotes from Ellison, since he has usually been my muse for my blogs. The story that I kept on thinking back to while reading Kammen’s American Culture, American Tastes was one found in Ellison’s essay “The Little Man at Chewhaw Station,” where the author reveals a time when he was discriminatory against his own race in regards to cultural preferences. After talking to a group of four black men, who are coal heavers, about opera, the author later asks, “Where on earth did you gentleman learn so much about grand opera?” What I found so funny about this scene was that the four black workers started laughing hysterically, which leads to Ellison’s embarrassment and shame. Furthermore, one of the workers then answers that all of the men have attended the Metropolitan Opera numerous times, and sometimes were not just audience members, but extras.

The reason why this scene is so relevant to this discuss about Kammen’s text is because it addresses the incongruities of race, economic status, education, and culture. The notion that race, economic status, and education dictate ones taste has always been perpetuated, but Ellison story shows that there are inconsistencies with this formula, that one may be at the lowest class and of a marginalized race, yet still can appreciate something thought to be high-brow. What I appreciate about Kammen is that he deconstructs the borders placed around highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow, and thereby shows how fluid their boundaries are and the mobility people have to go from one taste to the next. This is definitely what the democratization of American culture is all about.

What I have enjoyed doing while in Philadelphia has been to open inner-city children’s eyes to the fine arts, which I find so valuable. Although the democratization of American culture has occurred, I think there is still an issue of marginalized people feeling as though they are not able to connect with things they have been taught to see as highbrow, which then makes them feel as though they are not intelligent or educated enough to understand them. I think, however, that these feelings can be diminished by allowing easy access to the fine arts institutions as wells as strengthening art programs in public schools. Although the fine arts have been made more accessible via community programs at art museums and orchestras, what I am worried about is that less and less money is being put into art programs, especially at inner-city schools. Why I find this so troubling is that with the arts becoming less accessible for minority children, there is less of a democratization of American culture, which means that cultural stratification, especially along the lines of race, is reified. I do appreciate Kemmen’s optimism about the permeability of tastes when it comes to race, yet I feel that we as a society might be going backwards instead of forwards when it comes to the democratization of the arts.

I am very interested in how Kammen accounts for the extent of participatory of people in culture. In American Culture, American Taste, Kammen reveals two debates in 1950s and 1980s when they discuss the degree of passivity/interactivity of people to mass culture. This topic reappears in the books we’ve read this semester. Both Kammen and earlier, Levine, see the immediate active reactions of the audience toward a performance as some kind of characteristic of popular culture. For Levine, the elites’ disciplining of audience behavior led to the transition of the status of Shakespeare from popular entertainment to high art. Kammen sensed a danger here. For him, though the passivity of audience in front of high culture indicates decorum, the audience’s lack of interaction of mass culture equals a passive acceptance of mediocre cultural products, which implies an ideological inversion. One reason he provides to this phenomenon is that audiences’ genuine diversity is often ignored.

I am not so sure about the situation over ten years ago when this book was published. But I find Kammen’s quote from Herbert I. Schiller seems quite fit the circumstances:
“The audience does count… The managers of the cultural industries are acutely sensitive to the moods and feelings of the nation’s many publics. It is their job, for which they are paid handsomely, to make day-by-day, if not hour-by-hour, assessments of these feelings. When they are mistaken, as they frequently are, they lose their jobs.” (90) Imagine how this saying would strengthen Steven Johnson’s argument that pop culture is getting increasingly complex! As Johnson demonstrates, popular culture is growing more and more sophisticated in the last century, which in a way proves that in this interaction between consumer and producer, with the boosts brought by technology, both sides are taking progressive steps.

I just think the agency of the audience in front of cultural objects is more complex than just be generalized as “passive acceptance”. Raymond Williams’ formulation of the simultaneous pressure of dominant and counter-hegemonic currents is relevant to this inquiry: The most interesting and difficult part of any cultural analysis, in complex societies, is that which seeks to grasp the hegemonic in its active and formative but also its transformational processes. Works of art are often especially important as sources of this complex evidence. (Marxism and Literature 113-14)

This Culture Machine Kills Fascists.

So we've made it through the entire class and it's inevitable. We need to (once again) evaluate ourselves self-reflexively. What brow are you now that you have thought about it for 14 weeks?

I think there's a reoccurring problem that we (as consumers and defenders of taste) need to come to grips with. Artists don't want to be highbrow, but critics do.

In his discussion of American folk culture resisting the imposition of German Romantic (and dangerously Fascistic) "kultur," Kammen narrates a little story from our old friend Woody Guthrie. Guthrie exemplifies the paradoxes of a modern "folk" artist--incredibly commercially successful, sung in Kindergarten classrooms around the world, and yet connected to the "roots" of some "authentic" Americana. From his popularity we see and outpouring of support for the Tin Pan Alley crowd and protest singers of the sixties, and eventually, the epochal changing of the guard when Bob Dylan sold his soul and "plugged in." A similar kind of seduction to "sell out" took place even earlier, Kammen suggests. He writes that Guthrie "wrote to a friend early in the 1940s, referring to folk singers Pete Seeger and Lee Hays: 'Don't let Pete and Lee go highbrow on you'"...also asking Alan Lomax how "to get some of our upper crusts to listen to the real thing" (Kammen, 43).

This kind of distrust of highbrow art is not limited to folk culture, as we have seen throughout the semester. But I think we need to ask the following question: why can't highbrow/middlebrow/and lowbrow all be authentic elements of American culture?

I can imagine a class where Guthrie could be taught alongside Whitman and Bob Dylan and even Hawthorne and Melville for that matter. Just because Guthrie makes a claim to authenticity (that he can't really fulfill to some because of his commericial success) doesn't mean that he should not be remembered as a central part of our cultural history just like how Whitman was obscure and avant-garde in the 19th century as Kammen also points out.

Quality is not eradicated when we think about the brows, but it is evaluated by different criteria. Guthrie's famous line (later appropriated by Bob Dylan) "Some people can rob with a six gun and others with a fountain pen" needs to be updated for our context. Some people can rob you of an education with a canon and others with a dollar sign. As serious critic of American culture as a whole way of life we need to open ourselves to non-so authentic folk singers, plugged-in rock and rollers and popular artists alike. Can we be highbrow and defend Woody? I think so.

culture is a process...

One of the things that I appreciated about Kammen’s text was the way in which he tried to make sure that it could be useful to an academic and non-academic audience. I thought that the ways he incorporated theorists/theories was done in an accessible way, that if you new about Adorno, Williams, etc. you could take what you knew of their work to enrich what you were reading, but if you had never encountered them before you could also understand. His conversational tone—“By now the nonspecialist may very well feel overwhelmed by a surfeit of citations and contradictory points of view. If such browsers are still bearing with me, they surely must sense that the study of popular culture is clearly thriving in institutions of higher learning” (6)—made his text really easy to follow since he would have tons of evidence but then states his conclusions from that evidence in very plain and concrete language. I thought that the work was an interesting hybrid of theory, interpretation, and explication that epitomizes, for me, what a good cultural analysis should do.

I thought that his discussion of the origins of the division of brows coming with the proliferation of print materials, when he brought up Ohmann and Radway, was really interesting. The Lady’s Magazine, published in England from 1770-1837, was a unique publication in which the works of its readership were published alongside the work of authors such as Coleridge. But more interesting was the sentiment that was echoed in its editors’ notes continually through its nearly 70-year long run, that self-improvement must spring from “laudable curiosity”:

Criticism… is not that process of abstract reasoning, which disdains the aid of facts or observations…. It is exercised in its most simple when, after we have perused a literary production, or witnessed the representation of a dramatic piece, or surveyed a work of art, we call to mind what has pleased and what has displeased us in those performances; but when, from a laudable curiosity, or a desire of being enabled to explain the reasons of our admiration or our disappointment, we attentively examine those reasons, we rise into regions of philosophy, and are induced to conclude that only those principles which are founded on this solid basis can form the standard of true taste.

This term, echoed in Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy—arguably the most elitist text ever published—emphasizes the idea that “culture” is not a static object to be achieved, but a process and a becoming. The fact that purchasing publications in order to facilitate that process is just a fact of social mobility. And maybe the date of social stratification could be bumped back a little bit further...

1. In spite of Kammen's efforts, I am not sure I completely get all the distinctions between popular
culture, mass culture, proto-mass culture, folk culture, vernacular culture and common culture.
Is it just a quantitative distinction? Is it just a class distinction? Is it just really about TV? It does not help his efforts that all these types of culture exist at the same time. People still bowl and play golf and go to amusement parks. There are still regional cultural differences. There are still
massive state fairs. Shows at Disney World always include a lame audience participation component. On the other hand, before the 1890s people went to square dances and to saloons. I also find unconvincing his argument that acting rowdily at a Wild West Show or radio-listening and movie-going--the quintessential entertainment activities of the 1930s and 1940s--are truly participatory. The concern that arises with all this overlapping is that a critic can find almost
anything he wants to critique in any time period.

2. In Kammen's view mass culture did not really last that long. It began in the 1950s and using own criteria it is clear that by the time he wrote the book it was disappearing. (Johnson) Electronic mailing lists, contrary to Kammen, spell the end of mass culture. They enable catalogs to be sent out to the tiniest niche markets. Surfing the Web, because of the proliferation of sites, is not a mass activity and it is not without its participatory aspects. Was it really worth all the attention and vitriol directed against it?

3. Kammen's typical and justified complaint is "Not so fast." You think consumer culture has arisen by the 1900s. "Not so fast." You think mass culture had arisen by the 1920s. "Not so fast." The historical record shows a much more complex development. Ideology, whether democratic, nationalist or Marxist, obscured this more variegated situation. Another factor is that when
"literary types" look at history they look for the unified symbolic structures of a finely wrought literary work instead of seeing the messiness of history.

4. Is commodification so bad? It would have been more participatory and "authentic" if I had
played my own blues music, but since I have no musical talent it was much better for me to
buy Muddy Water's LPs and listen to them. Admittedly Muddy was underpaid for his efforts and he should not have been, but there is no intrinsic link between this and commodification. Elvis was not underpaid or at least not nearly to the same extent. Before commodification most humans lived most of their lives literally covered in shit. To compare dark Satanic malls to dark Satanic mills is quite a stretch.

5. Even at the end of the semester I am still a "level up" elitist of sorts. I think we should start
with the great works of literature and and add in those works of popular culture that meet perhaps somewhat relaxed standards. Some will make the cut. Most will not. "Casablanca" will. "Porky's Revenge" will not.

Taste, Consume... Indegestion

First, I have to admit, after reading Kammen's VISUAL SHOCK a few years ago, I was more than excited to get in to the nuts and bolts of American Culture American Tastes. I don't want to sound too much like a fan-boy, but VISUAL SHOCK was one of the few cultural studies books I could get my hands on while in Korea, and it's a book I keep coming back to in terms of the direction and style I hope to implement in my own writing. This is not completely unrelated to my post. One of the streams that has run through almost all the texts for class is this relationship between how owning something (purchasing it vs. creating it) has an invariable impact the ways we construct our identities. I'm reminded of something one of my good friends once told me about meeting new people... She said “It doesn't matter what the person IS like, what matters is WHAT they like.”
In American Culture, American Tastes, Kammen is interested in this very relationship. I'm drawn to page 66, where Kammen states that, “By the 1920's, however, four decades of intensive immigration had opened the eyes of manufacturers and marketing people to the process of Americanization as an opportunity for expansive consumerism.” The impact of modernity upon personal identity, and it could be said collective identity (the way we identify with others), is largely hinged upon this ideas of social and relational designation through consumption.
Within democratic capitalism, its striking at how essential consumption is in designating not only class, but things like religion, sexuality, and ethnicity as well. However, sticking with just one of these, for the sake of brevity and the title of the book, let's stick to this idea of “American.” The general consensus I've gathered from the text is that this shift in niche marketing to immigrants and children of immigrants redefined what it means to be “American “within the nation's collective consciousness. No longer did American mean someone with citizenship who held a set of core ideals similar to those of other Americans. To be American meant, and I would argue still means, to consume and participate within Fordism and the inevitable Post-Fordism that followed. The national identity of those hoping to exist outside such a system has traditionally been called in to debate, slandered, and excised from the healthy body-politic. Black-listed, harassed, or even exiled. How democratic is consumer hyper-capitalism if it doesn't allow for anyone or anything to exist outside of it?
I can't believe I'm going to end my last post of the year with a quote from the flawed film 12 Monkeys, but... Jeffrey Goines (Brad Pitt's character) while locked down in the asylum erupts, “There's the television. It's all right there - all right there. Look, listen, kneel, pray. Commercials! We're not productive anymore. We don't make things anymore. It's all automated. What are we *for* then? We're consumers, Jim. Yeah. Okay, okay. Buy a lot of stuff, you're a good citizen. But if you don't buy a lot of stuff, if you don't, what are you then, I ask you? What? Mentally *ill*. Fact, Jim, fact - if you don't buy things - toilet paper, new cars, computerized yo-yos, electrically-operated sexual devices, stereo systems with brain-implanted headphones, screwdrivers with miniature built-in radar devices, voice-activated computers... “

Is Kammen Resisting Adorno?

Kammen does something well worth admiring in this book: he puts forth a new model for us to envision popular culture, mass culture, and "proto-mass culture"—the point of transition. But sometimes I find this model convincing and original, and sometimes I don’t. In particular I’m troubled by what feels like “Diet Adorno”—that is, Adorno minus critique.

I like when Kammen emphasizes the roles of things like standardization and technology as catalysts for the move from popular or proto-mass culture to mass culture. He makes a strong point when he points out how regionalism and so on meant that, until the mid-twentieth century, the audience for culture couldn’t be as mass as it was after standardization. He suggests that the move from popular culture to mass culture was predicated in part on overcoming race/class distinctions and creating a mass audience, and that was accomplished through the mass production brought about by technology. Cool, I’m down.

But I don’t like Kammen’s active/passive distinction. It’s so troubled that Kammen himself has to keep revising it and offering provisos every few pages. His basic assertion is that popular culture was a more participatory, active culture than mass culture, which, to follow, minimizes audience participation and makes audiences more passive. The most vivid discussion of this is that passage from Aldous Huxley: “In the past when people needed recreation they were compelled to a great extent to provide it for themselves. [. . .] [But today] Recreation is provided ready-made by enormous joint-stock companies. The play-instinct, which found active expression in the past, is now passive” (88-89).

This idea makes good sense, but it’s a fairly typical view of popular culture vs. mass culture. It’s basically exactly what Adorno says in his “Culture Industry Reconsidered” essay from 1967. Adorno tells us that he favors the term “culture industry” “in order to exclude from the outset the interpretation favorable to its advocates: that it is a matter of something like a culture that arises spontaneously from the masses themselves, the contemporary form of popular art. From the latter the culture industry must be distinguished in the extreme” (98). Adorno insists, in closing, “The customer is not king, as the culture industry would have us believe, not its subject but its object” (99).

Isn’t this the same basic active/passive distinction that Kammen makes, that Huxley makes? Then why do we need a new model for it? Kammen’s active/passive binary just seems like a de-politicized version of Adorno. He makes the same active/passive point that Adorno makes but without the critique or the political urgency. Adorno is concerned about the passivity of the culture industry and says it’s domination. Kammen, on the other hand, seems almost to celebrate the overcoming of regionalism, etc. by mass culture. My question is this: why does Kammen stress the active/passive distinction of popular/mass culture but want to avoid the “commodification” point or “conspiratorial view” of the neo-Marxists (Adorno, et. al.) that he derides? (46). Isn’t it a problem that mass culture has made mass audiences massively passive?

And incidentally, if you want to talk about media and activity/passivity, you want to talk about McLuhan. His models of “hot” and “cool” media stress a point that Kammen makes: “The most meaningful distinction may very well be between active and passive audiences for a particular medium rather than between lowbrow and elite” (91, emphasis added).

to what end?

Back in 2002 I sat in on a reading group of some students in the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design which included a couple books by Neil Postman. We read Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology and another collection of essays. Given that Johnson mentions a different book, my comments might not apply. Postman was asking TO WHAT END are these forms of media the means?

We can criticize their content -- the games teach us how to pragmatically negotiate the achievement of social rewards (commodity fetishism). Was anyone else horrified at the guy who spent all his "leisure" hours clicking to virtually mine ore, make tools to sell, and purchase a new virtual home? CLEARLY, the video game gives him something his dead end job doesn't (the illusion/feeling of progress). This doesn't mean it should be celebrated; it should be seen as a pathological symptom of life in the garbage heap of late capitalism.

Postman followed in the footsteps of EP Thompson who saw oppressive social relationships embedded in the technologies themselves (as did the luddites who resisted them) and the way they became the foundation for further entrenchments of class domination. His focus was more on how culture now tends to be determined more by its participation and dissemination through high technological means (and produced by those with the means to high technology). His book was about the social and ecological relationships on which these technologies were based, NOT how these technologies and virtual entertainments can teach us how to better negotiate the world (and on its terms). Their goals are opposite.

Our kids supposedly get cognitive exercise while electronic waste floods the developing world with heavy metals doing actual brain damage. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_waste

My question is really: who cares? What are the problems these games are helping us to solve? At best they come closer to mimicking the life we already live but presenting it in a way that obscures our REAL relation to it *cough*Althusser*cough*.

Here are two "false morels" a couple friends and I found today in Frick Park (this great 3 dimensional and topographically challenging interface with hypertextures and multi-sensory engagement). We were, of course, looking for REAL Morels. These false ones will put you in the hospital if you improperly ID them. The humidity conditions weren't right (although they ARE growing further away from the dry city).

Have You Fed Your Real Baby Today?

“Games are teaching critical thinking skills and a sense of yourself as an agent having to make choices and live with those choices.” – James Paul Gee

Although I was quite intrigued with Johnson’s explanation of the complexity of video games and the opportunity video-game users have of practicing, albeit subconsciously, critical thinking, I still remain skeptic that popular culture is making society smarter. Only several weeks ago, a couple in South Korea was arrested for neglecting their 3-year-old baby daughter, who died of starvation. What shocked me the most about this case was that the couple had devoted countless hours raising a virtual girl character online to the extent that they barely found the time to feed their real daughter. This is pretty unsettling to anyone, regardless if you are a parent or not.

Although I am sure that Johnson would call the noted case an outlier in his research, the very fact that cases such as these are a reality causes me to question whether the critical skills acquired through video games can be transferred to the real-world setting. I definitely agree with Johnson that video games have increased in sophistication, and I am constantly amazed by how realistic and involving these systems have become, but there is no denying the fact that technology is also causing mental, and also physical, atrophy to a certain extent. I believe that many people have become so captivated and mesmerized by the sophistication of technology that they have fallen victim to apathy and complacency, spending countless time mastering complicated digital objects, yet unable (or even unwilling) to sort out real-life problems, some of which are much less complicated.

What I believe Johnson leaves out are the negative consequences of the rising complexity and sophistication of technology. If more and more time needs to be devoted to adjusting to newer and better technology in order to achieve the rewards for doing so, does that mean less time is devoted to confronting the demands of real life? To me, it is all about transferability, and it seems as though sophisticated technology has made people desensitized to the real-world instead of enhancing applicable critical skills.

At first I found it appealing when Steven Johnson says in the introduction that he is not going to take a symbolic approach at the cultural objects, like what most cultural studies do--to establish a symbolic relationship between the work and some spirit of the age. He suggests that the cultural object is not a metaphor for the system, but more like an output or a result, and he would try to systemically diagram the competing forces rather than to decode them. (10) I thought he might be able to come up with a method of cultural studies that can go beyond that sort of ‘symptomatic interpretation’, which oftentimes neglects the specificity of cultural objects and reaches a reading that they are all expressions of the social configuration.

But I was disappointed when I saw the string Johnson uses to thread all the different media is just "the cognitive benefit". And this benefit of popular culture is being analyzed as an isolated process. While "cognition" refers to "a faculty for the processing of information", the question of what kind of information is being processed is more crucial. Ideologized information or ture information to the real world? Johnson uses "man-made weather system" as an analogy to demonstrate what he thinks of culture--it serves as a metaphor for his approach in return--the cognitive complexity only reflects higher level of self-recreation: there is no man-made weather system in real.

In justifying the popular culture, this approach focuses too much on the neurological appetites of the brain, but not the economical aspect of the culture industry, as he promised. He might want to remind people who are there creating these order and meaning that our increasingly stronger cognitive muscles are responding to?

Thoughts on Everything Bad Is Good For You

It’s ironic that the video games Johnson repeatedly uses as examples for their cognitive benefits are, Tetris, The Sims, Ultima, Zelda. These are games that are devoid of violence, yet Johnson argues that violent content is something that we shouldn’t be concerned with because violent content doesn’t have as much of an impact on our thinking compared to the game form. Why doesn’t he use more examples of complicated violent games then? Granted he does use a violent game like the Grand Theft Auto series a few times to represent strategy, but not nearly as often as non-violent games. He’s also compelled to point out that “shooter games are rarities on gaming best-seller lists” and that games like SimCity and Tetris regularly outsell these other games. He doesn’t cite any statistics to prove this, but the fact he needs to point out the high popularity of these non-violent games, undermines "the content doesn’t really matter all that much" argument which his overall thesis is dependent on. In general, I think he's well aware that he's on thin ice if he pushes violent video games as valid ways to enhance more complex thinking.

The form of reality TV programming may have narrative complexity and strategic value, but at least for me, the degraded content outweighs the benefits accrued from the form. I can watch about five minutes of The Apprentice (is it even on any more?) before I change the channel. The “social intelligence” and “strategy” that Johnson finds in these shows for me, translates to conniving and devious backstabbing. Reality TV form isn’t all that interesting or complicated anyway. Most of these shows are based on some sort of grimy competition for a big cash prize. The argument he also makes when he compares The Apprentice to shows like Who’s the Boss and Mork & Mindy, doesn’t help his case. He writes, “a show like The Apprentice, say – doesn’t look so bad when measured against the dregs of television past” (132). To advocate that reality TV is good for people, by framing it as the lesser of two evils, is not very persuasive. And come on, Who’s the Boss gave us Tony Danza! Who is going to remember any of the forgettable contestants on The Apprentice.

If anyone is interested in a book that basically argues against everything Johnson advocates, it’s Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death (Johnson mentions Postman a few times). Postman’s book is a bit dated (1985), and he often comes off as a luddite, but it’s a great foil to Johnson’s work, and I think more convincing.

Matt Nelson

Cognitively--but not ideologically--challenging

[Yeah. So. I was supposed to just comment on a post, but I was impelled to do a post of my own. What I wanted to talk about wasn't really something I could "comment" on someone else's post.]

While I find Johnson's argument about the benefits of increasinly complex "smart culture" convincing, there are ideological problems that I noticed along the way. In his Afterward, Johnson acknowledges with an apparent degree of suprise that the majority of criticism against his book "tended to come more from the left than the right" (204). To be honest, I found Johnson's discussion of this "leftist criticism" utterly lacking in substance. What Johnson either fails or just refuses to acknowledge here is the longstanding tradition that the left has when it comes to criticizing the content of mass culture, which progressives tend to see as an apologia for the consumer capitalist status quo. Adorno and Horkheimer make just this point in their famous "Culture Industry" essay: mass culture, rather than empowering audiences to question the capitalist status quo, instead sells capitalist ideology.

I noticed just this thing happening in some of Johnson's examples. Take that anecdote about how his nephew decided he should lower industrial tax rates as a way of attracting businesses to his Sim City. Johnson uncritically celebrates this moment: his nephew is learning! But frankly I'm a bit troubled by what he learned. Johnson just says he learned a strategy, but I say that he learned free-market capitalist ideology. This strategy isn't value-free but is, rather, laden with ideology. Isn't this just the kind of "market thinking" that turned some of our Rust Belt cities into ghost towns and propelled us into our current Great Recession? And this Sim City thing isn't an isolated example. We see the same thing with one of Johnson's favorite reality shows, The Apprentice. Sure, we're learning strategies and mapping social networks when watching the show, but in the meantime we're soaking up corporate ideology. Great, now I know how to both make networks of friends and crush my competition.

No wonder Johnson got criticism from the Left. His book is built upon the foundation that, ultimately, the extent to which media makes us think is more important than its actual content or subject matter, but when those of us on the Left look at the ideological content of mass culture, we know that it's too important--and sometimes too dangerous--to simply dismiss as simply a "less important factor" in media consumption.

A few months ago a Japanese man married a video game character. Yep, that's right... legally married a video game character. In another equally bizarre incident,the BBC reported in August of 2005, a South Korea a man died after playing StarCraft (an online role playing game) for 50 hours straight. In Asia, gaming is a profession. The more remarkable players are celebrities in their repective fields, with games being televised 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. These two incidents, while rather isolated in the extreme nature, demonstrate the intricate ways in which our understanding and interaction with technology are so closely connected to our very existence.
As an occasional gamer, and a friend of avid gamers, I found Steven Johnson's arguments concerning the structure and use of video games rather enlightening. I can't say that I agree with him 100%, but the implications of his argument are intriguing to me.
Johnson claims that the environment inherent to video games stimulates our brains to produce opioids and rewards the player unlike any other form of entertainment. This strengthens his arguments that we need to evaluate the "form" of video games, rather than the content because there is an implication that something more complex is involved. Through the this kind of achieve-and-reward situation, one could extrapolate further implications concerning the lack of life-or-death driven obstacles inherent to our own evolution as a species. As technology has advanced, our survival instincts have been lulled to a point at which our rewards for ensuring survival are actually rewards for achieving comfortability. Obviously this doesn't hold true to all cultures, but in cultures that embrace the achieve-and-reward video game (and I know Johnson says we shouldn't the take content of the games too seriously) daily life is not a struggle for survival.
The connection of brain chemistry to the virtual world is interesting. The established links between clinical depression and video game use are pretty clear. Video game addiction develops almost primarily within those already suffering from clinical depression. However, like most addictive forms (let's face it, there are stranger ones than video games) the amount of time spent playing is typically a reflection of the level of depression being suffered. However, few addictions have so permeated out society to the extent we cannot escape it. Technology (whether you have an ipod or a blu ray player or upgrade your laptop) is an addiction that we all suffer from. At what point do we embrace this addiction and allow for a symbiotic relationship, and at what point do we resist?

Program or be Programmed!

Now before I get into this, I have to say that I am no computer programmer. I have never been a computer programmer. I will probably never be a computer programmer. The difference, however, between what Johnson describes as end-user interfaces and coding/programming is important for us to take a critical look at in Johnson's book. At the recent SXSW festival, Douglas Rushkoff (who you notice is quoted many times by Johnson) made the bold proclamation: Program or be Programmed! Learning how to use computers is not enough to prevent being used by the people who create their architecture (ahem, CMU technocrats I'm looking at you). So as much as I want to take Johnson's word about how the internet (and computers in general) give us the tools to engage our world more intelligently, there is an untold story here. Let's take his example: Apple's iTunes. While I could go into a rant about Digital Rights Management (DRM) and the sad fact that artists only see 7 cents of the 99 cents from your iTunes download, I'll look to the future...Apple's iPad simply does not fit with the "learn as you explore" narrative that Johnson advocates on page 123 specifically and throughout his writings on digital culture. Many pedagogical researchers have made convincing arguments about the educational benefits of neglecting the manual and learning to use software by playing around, but the iPad directly prohibits that kind of freedom. Yes it is sweet to double-tap and get any program on the iPad to work, but it sucks that the user cannot install any program that is not preapproved by Apple. The internet, and digital hardware/software is not a place to explore. It is a place to receive content. Quickly, rigidly, and the way Apple wants you to.

Learning how to interact with interfaces documents an impressive new literacy. But with any literacy, there are many other questions and problems built into learning it, studying it, and defending it. The interactivity that Johnson lauds is limited which means that the liberatory rhetroic surrounding this new literacy must be contingent as well.

1. Not surprisingly, I am going to defend reading, especially serious reading, against Johnson. He is correct that TV shows and video games are more complex than they used to be. (But what
about "The Prisoner?" I don't think anyone has figured out in 45 years what that show was
about.) But this is like saying that the tallest building in Peoria is now taller.

2. Sometimes I think Johnson makes my arguments for me. He argues that the content of the video games does not matter, only the structure. From these games, and the reality TV shows based on them, he argues that you learn not how to engage in sustained thinking, but how to
engage in pure strategic thinking. Life is not just strategy and this is what you miss if video games squeeze out serious reading. It seems like the only thing you really get better at by
playing video games is playing video games. These games are complicated but not complex. The fact that you need a 200-page guide to play but not any advanced education is a significant
indicator. He compares video games to mathematics, but mathematics can be applied to science and engineering and is not just a game.

3. Johnson is dismissive of reading to acquire facts, but Sarah Palin shows you what someone is
like without a fact base. She also shows you what someone is like who lacks depth, which you
can also acquire from serious reading. Other politicians often lack this also. There is a difference between reading political and social science and even biographies of John Adams and Winston
Churchill and reading "Hamlet" and "Macbeth."

4. Another place where Johnson seems to make my arguments for me is when he argues that
video game playing is like a drug that stimulates the pleasure centers of the brain. "Reward is everywhere in gameworld." Is this really the best environment to produce mature individuals? Johnson answers this himself when he argues that there is a blurring of kid and grownup culture. Adults should not be worrying about how to get their unicorns to eat more rainbow-colored mushrooms. Maybe you can learn how to strategize better if you think about feeding your unicorns, but is this necessarily such a good thing? I think those individuals who devised the speculative finanical instruments that almost collapsed the economy were good at thinking strategically--and were probably excellent video game players--but were clearly deficient in other types of thinking. From Johnson's perspective, the machiavellian deviant Richard Hatch
should be President.

5. Aristotle argued that you can have about 5 friends, because friendship implies having to spend a lot of time with and energy on your friends. In spite of what social-networking sites and Johnson imply, you cannot have 10,000 friends. I think these sites are a good symbol for what is wrong with Johnson's argument. Social-networking "friendships" squeeze out the time you should be spending on real friendships, just as video games squeeze out the time you should be
spending on learning how to perform sustained thinking.

6. Johnson is correct that technological factors have moved our economy from a mass consumption to a mass customization economy. However, this means that he is making unfair
comparisons when he compares "24" to "Gilligan's Island." He is comparing a niche show to
a mass culture show from the period when the three networks dominated mass culture. The number of viewers "24" gets would have led to the show's cancellation in the 1960s.

7. "Seinfeld" is a funny show and much more complex than "Green Acres," but it is still
in a sense trivial. I remember thinking after 9/11 that we could never watch "Seinfeld"in the
same way, because life is too serious.