essential poptimist reading

[jauntyalan.livejournal.com]

I was originally going to write quite a long bit about this book, but then I thought I might save that up and just ask YOU LOT if any of you have read it.

Not everything in it rings true, but the core observations (mass/pop culture is getting more cognitively demanding), and the fundamental inference (our brains WANT to be challenged) are things that everyone here will probably agree with. It's never a good thing to agree wholeheartedly with an argument/book, at least it feels wrong/uncomfortable to me, but my disagreements here are minor to trivial.

indeed the "mass/pop culture is getting more cognitively demanding" thing is so obviously true, but he actually goes into quantifiable specifics in a nice way. plus it's nice to have someone actually bloody well saying so forthrightly and in public, rather than the usual crap "going to hell in a lowest common denominator handbag"

he doesn't actually touch on music much at all (i'm going back to find that bit, cos there was something ironically slightly rockist about singles v albums he mentions) but it's still poptimism.

anyway. anyone?

Comments

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

something we were discussing last night re doctor who "second" series = the sheer intractability of the obstacle course of exploring subtleties of plot and possibility in character-growth over a 43-year (!) naraative arc versus NOT PUTTIN OFF VER KIDS w.yer CONTINUITY BACKSTORY 4RS3-TIGHTNESS

TV literacy now includes at least a basic* (haha hegelian) sense of the relationship between the history of the medium and the history of you the viewer -- simply negotiating the channelverse and speedreading the genre require a highly complex knowledge input from even a fairly rubbish and passive viewer

*i realise that this is most often expressed in the phrase "what were we thinking?" but this is still critical engagement of a kind

[zenith.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'd be interested to read this - my hunch is that like you I will find a few things to disagree with: writers of these kind of books always have to overegg the pudding so that the title can be all one thing, as it were - he couldn't call it Everything Bad Is Good For You (Except The Few Things That Are Actually Bad). However overall it sounds like a welcome counter to TELLYVISION: TEH DRUG OF A NATION! etc.

[jauntyalan.livejournal.com]

i found the stuff on pop music - in an endnote that takes in comics too - and i'm not sure i agree with it. largely because the appeal of music is more plural than i think he takes it to be (which is a bit stroky chin at first blush)

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

Oh I haven't heard of that book - it looks interesting.

I'm not sure if mass/pop culture is getting more cognitively demanding in the sense that what it consists of is more cognitively demanding - but as a monolithic thing in itself which needs to be engaged with, it certainly is (and it needs to be engaged with properly! rather than the lazy opposite-ends-of-spectrum discourse currently on offer, ie outright dismissal vs "postmodernism blaaaargh")

[jauntyalan.livejournal.com]

i think in the realm of telly at least, that the cognitive demand thing is clear (and the way it's spelled out in the book is interesting). as someone who watches quite a lot of old telly, it's v obvious that the pace of information exchange has ramped up considerably, and specifically the typical complexity of character relationships and layers of narrative threads has changed enormously. more so that this increased complexity is now EXPECTED of the model audience, and that if you could transmit some of today's popular dramas back in time 20 years the audience would be frightened and confused.

he does a good job of comparing apples with apples and lemons with lemons (as he puts it in the book), and the "story threads" comparisons Dragnet -> Starsky and Hutch -> Hill Street Blues -> Sopranos works very well. i also quite liked the "character relationship" net he draws of Dallas and 24.

actually he keeps returning to the *structure* of the sopranos, which is fine as far as his argument goes, because the "content" is irrelevant to his story, but irked me for precisely the wrong reasons - that i can't stand gangster stories.

of course the type of "good" that he's talking about is quite a narrow one.

[jauntyalan.livejournal.com]

yeah obv he doesn't mean EVERYTHING bad, and he does mean a very narrow sense of "good for you"

[dickmalone.livejournal.com]

I wrote about it (http://claps.blogspot.com/2005/05/i-had-first-heard-about-steven.html#links) at some length, back when it came out in the US last year. It's definitely worth reading, though, as I say, I think it overlooks some fairly big points, which Johnson wrote me to say was fair, but those things were sort of beyond his purview, and that he had addressed them somewhat in previous books. I also think that talking about pop being "good for you" is sort of antithetical to the purposes of pop.

[carsmilesteve.livejournal.com]

the sopranos is just soap though (says the person who's never watched an episode)

see also the pop video i suppose, even looking back at firestarter it seems so quaint and slow in comparison to hype williams style 2006 vids, but the consternation it caused at the time...

[jauntyalan.livejournal.com]

agree with a lot of what you say, and tho i'm shy of anyone who wants to talk about rapture, i'm totally with you that that is an inseparable part of pop culture - and what i referred to in the longer response up there a bit. BUT the amount of information thing in old telly is totally OTM.

repeats of old dramas are not watched so much by ppl who haven't seen them, and are usually then equated with less demanding dramas of today. someone watching repeats of dallas might do so in the same way as they'd get into a routine of watching an aussie soap, but a teen fed a diet of 24 and Lost would find it plodding and tiresome. I myself watch 70s scifi, and while I'm aware of the slow spoon-feed-the-audience pace of events i consciously make allowances for it for the enjoyment of other qualities - principally the weirdness of the stories.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

dallas vs 24 = apples vs lemons a bit surely, thrillwise? dallas was not a thriller (ok haha NOR IS 2Zzzzzzzz but that's not the point i'm making)

so what about the professionals vs 24? *sings words to professionals themetune*

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

actually i think a clearer comparison -- which makes the complexity point but maybe also somewhat undercuts johnson's optimism -- is to compare a VANGUARD thriller of today with something like (the incredibly useless) SPOOKS; that's where you really feel the draggy lameness of structure and technique (except you also have to be aware the cultural darwinism has not yet offed spooks and its ilk...

HMMM THINKING ABOUT THIS A BIT HARDER

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

isn't there something potentially ANTI-poptimist about treating "it's good for you" and/or "progressive cultural complexity" as trumping values? the first seems quite braggish, the second distressingly hongroid

[jauntyalan.livejournal.com]

the success of spooks baffles me. fair point that 24 v dallas isn't a fair comparison. actually he falls down on some of his examples a few times. tho you'd be fair pushed to disagree that LotR adaptations had more main players than Star Wars, some of the characters he cites i can't even recall.

tho this is perhaps cos i am old, and i didn't actually like LotR that much

Re: HMMM THINKING ABOUT THIS A BIT HARDER

[jauntyalan.livejournal.com]

his "good for you" is just an antithesis to the "it's making our kids into zombies" dross. what he's actually saying is that pop culture is making our brains work harder than it did. and he's not trying to validate individual items of pop cult, and asking to say A > B bcz C, but that "as a whole" culture is becoming more demanding and complex, and that this is bcz in some aspects of culture, our BRANE demands it. the 'as a whole' is important.

the hongroidness of it hadn't escaped me, but there is something to it, but principally it is NOT a trumping value - because he's looking, and admits so, at something quite narrow. that there are other things he's not even looking at. starting with the entire "content"

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

in the commentaries they actually said the number of LotR main players at some point and i was astonished how FEW it was! unfortunately i can't remember the number either

just doing a count-up in my head it's about 30 i think

[jauntyalan.livejournal.com]

try the same with Star Wars. hard to get past half that

i shall attempt 1xhomology

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

jarjar binks = legolas

[koganbot]

I browsed the book last year for about two minutes at Barnes & Noble, thought the guy was a good guy, then forgot about him totally. So I haven't read enough to know if you're treating him fairly, but your criticisms sure seem on the money, and Johnson's concept of "cognitively demanding" seems absurdly narrow. Maybe I'll post about that below. In the meantime, though, I'll respond to "talking about pop being 'good for you' is sort of antithetical to the purposes of pop." I disagree. The relationship between "fun" and "good for you" is fraught in pop, and probably always will be. It's fraught in my life, too. My posting on Poptimists contains an element of "I am engaging in moral and intellectual exploration" - like I'm an Ashlee Simpson song or something - which is "good for me" and helps me to rationalize my spending time here rather than spending it making the money that will get me out of debt. But then, engaging in moral and intellectual exploration also makes Poptimists more fun, so...

[dickmalone.livejournal.com]

Johnson's idea of "good for you" seems to line up pretty closely with what, say, an American newsweekly's idea of "good for you" would be; he ascribes qualities to pop that we are more familiar seeing associated with community service and playing classical music to infants. I think he's doing this pretty purposefully--he's trying to make the case for pop's value to middlebrow America, not to intellectuals--but it made me all sweary, and I think understandably so, since pop to me seems to be engaged in much more lofty pursuits than merely growing more neurons. I tend to see moral and intellectual exploration as part of the "good life" rather than being "good for you" with all its dutiful connotations (if something is good for you then not doing it is naughty and pop definitely seems naughty to me) but I guess this is splitting semantic hairs at this point. Anyway, the book's worth a read if you go into it with those caveats I think and I'll send you my copy if you want (and if you promise to ignore my notes). His analysis of TV is probably the best, but it's also the lowest-hanging fruit, I feel.

[dickmalone.livejournal.com]

"i'm shy of anyone who wants to talk about rapture"

Can I ask why?

A while back I got the really strong feeling that my attitude toward art was kinda religious in nature, or I guess more accurately that modern evangelical Christianity was searching for a guilt-free way of getting the feeling I get out of art, which sure is an egotistical thing to think. My blog subtitle for a long time was "we are pentecoastal" and now it's "god hates your tears." I guess I haven't thought about this very thoroughly.

[koganbot]

OK, I haven't read the book, so I don't know the argument Johnson's making when he's saying culture "as a whole" is becoming more demanding and complex. Demanding in what way? It's certainly not demanding that most of us know how to build a fire or organize a hunt for big game. Does his idea of "cognitively demanding" take in social interaction? For surely the strongest criticism of video games isn't that they're not difficult enough but rather that kids play the games rather than playing with each other or with the rest of their family. Or they play the games instead of doing their homework. Of course one can say the same about reading or arithmetic or any number of activities that can potentially draw you away from human back and forth. And what you glean from TV and from video games can be used in social interaction, and watching TV and playing video games can be social interaction when you're doing it with others. But still, does he address these criticisms head on?

So, in what way is pop culture making our brains work harder than it formerly had? For instance, one can say that Pirates of the Caribbean demands way more knowledge of pirate story conventions, comic books, contemporary movies, or whatever, than Mutiny on the Bounty and Moonfleet had back in the day (is this even true? well let's say it's true). But what does it demand in the way of knowledge of human beings, and what does it have to give? I mean it barely has any human beings (the Johnny Depp character, maybe), much less any interesting relationships among them (compare to Mutiny on the Bounty, which was hardly subtle, but Gable, Tone, and Laughton surely displayed some interpersonal interaction, right?). I don't get why psychology doesn't count as "cognitive."

I suppose viewers of Pirates of the Caribbean can engage in interesting or boring interaction with each other (as can viewers of Bounty), and you can't necessarily read off the movie whether it's viewers use it in interesting or boring ways.

[koganbot]

Denver Public Library has the Johnson book, so I won't have to borrow yours, but thanks for the offer.

You have to understand that when I was 12 I actually conceptualized listening to Top 40 (and gritting my teeth through the songs I didn't like) as "doing my homework," i.e., trying to keep up with my peers (though if I hadn't liked any of the music, I wouldn't have stuck with it for the next 40 years).

I think part three of my book (which by the way can be borrowed from the New York Public Library, if that's near to you) can be summarized as "a little puritanism is better than no puritanism; a little puritanism is better than too much puritanism." One of the book's heroes is a Calvinist theologian.

Don't mean to break off the conversation, but I have to go listen to Mariah Carey. It will make me a better person.

[koganbot]

it's viewers = its viewers

See! Movies are making me stupid.