Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad is Good For You and fandom: preliminary thoughts
It’s always a little suspicious when someone asks you to believe something really attractive. I mean sure, Mr. Johnson, I’d love to believe that “popular culture has, on average, grown more complex and intellectually challenging over the past thirty years.” What partaker of that culture wouldn’t? But Johnson gets down to what he’s talking about on page 9, and I’m going to quote it because it’s pretty darn interesting:
Most of the time, criticism that takes pop culture seriously involves performing some kind of symbolic analysis, decoding the work to demonstrate the way it represents some other aspect of society. You can see this symbolic approach at work in academic cultural studies programs analyzing the ways in which pop forms expressed the struggle of various disenfranchised groups: gays and lesbians, people of color, women, the third world. You can see it at work in the “zeitgeist” criticism featured in the media sections of newspapers and newsweeklies, where the critic establishes a symbolic relationships between the work and some spirit of the age: yuppie self-indulgence, say, or post-9/11 anxiety.
The approach followed in this book is more systematic than symbolic, more about causal relationships than metaphors. It is closer, in a sense, to physics than to poetry. My argument for the existence of the Sleeper Curve [named for the Woody Allen film about a future in which scientists are appalled that we weren’t aware of the health benefits of cake, or whatever] comes out of an assumptions that the landscape of popular culture involves the clash of competing forces: the neurological appetites of the brain, the economics of the culture industry, changing technological platforms. The specific ways in which those forces collide play a determining role in the type of popular culture we ultimately consume. The work of the critic, in this instance, is to diagram those forces, not decode them.
Okay. Sorry about all that, but I just couldn’t cut it down. Note that he doesn’t dismiss outright the “symbolic analysis” school of cultural studies; just that his argument for these “bad” things being “good” is not based on any moral standards but on cognitive ones. He starts out, predictably enough, in the realm of video games, and describes a “fictional world where rewards are larger, and more vivid, more clearly defined, than life.” He stresses that “only” in games are you forced to discover the rules-it’s not a static universe like a book or a film. What’s important to him are the cognitive steps you take to learn the universe, not the actual narrative. What is more, the rewards one gets from playing games are not the “instant gratification” decried by the naysayers-most games today require hours of play to accomplish anything.
Now, I know Johnson talks about television later in the book, but I can’t help but stop right here and notice a few things about fandom (most particularly online fandom). Because when I read about a property that forces you to interact with it in ways you may not have a map for (this is why guidebooks to games are bestsellers), that doles out defined rewards with an addictive quality, I’m seeing fandom. Specifically in the sense that fandom is the creation of a game out of a static property. This game consists not only of “creating” the fic, art and “meta” that make up the currency of the fan community (and provides reward in the form of reviews and notoriety), but of “discovering” the rules of fannish interaction-both with the text and with other fans. Whatever the content of the “fanned” property of at least relatively fixed canon, there is a complex series of interactions which expand our involvement with it, and create the sort of fictional world Johnson’s talking about with video games. In this construction, the fictional world isn’t really the universe of the tv show or film or novel-it’s the one we make right here, together. We have our own reward system, our own currency, our own geography and social system.
In other words, SimFandom.
Most of the time, criticism that takes pop culture seriously involves performing some kind of symbolic analysis, decoding the work to demonstrate the way it represents some other aspect of society. You can see this symbolic approach at work in academic cultural studies programs analyzing the ways in which pop forms expressed the struggle of various disenfranchised groups: gays and lesbians, people of color, women, the third world. You can see it at work in the “zeitgeist” criticism featured in the media sections of newspapers and newsweeklies, where the critic establishes a symbolic relationships between the work and some spirit of the age: yuppie self-indulgence, say, or post-9/11 anxiety.
The approach followed in this book is more systematic than symbolic, more about causal relationships than metaphors. It is closer, in a sense, to physics than to poetry. My argument for the existence of the Sleeper Curve [named for the Woody Allen film about a future in which scientists are appalled that we weren’t aware of the health benefits of cake, or whatever] comes out of an assumptions that the landscape of popular culture involves the clash of competing forces: the neurological appetites of the brain, the economics of the culture industry, changing technological platforms. The specific ways in which those forces collide play a determining role in the type of popular culture we ultimately consume. The work of the critic, in this instance, is to diagram those forces, not decode them.
Okay. Sorry about all that, but I just couldn’t cut it down. Note that he doesn’t dismiss outright the “symbolic analysis” school of cultural studies; just that his argument for these “bad” things being “good” is not based on any moral standards but on cognitive ones. He starts out, predictably enough, in the realm of video games, and describes a “fictional world where rewards are larger, and more vivid, more clearly defined, than life.” He stresses that “only” in games are you forced to discover the rules-it’s not a static universe like a book or a film. What’s important to him are the cognitive steps you take to learn the universe, not the actual narrative. What is more, the rewards one gets from playing games are not the “instant gratification” decried by the naysayers-most games today require hours of play to accomplish anything.
Now, I know Johnson talks about television later in the book, but I can’t help but stop right here and notice a few things about fandom (most particularly online fandom). Because when I read about a property that forces you to interact with it in ways you may not have a map for (this is why guidebooks to games are bestsellers), that doles out defined rewards with an addictive quality, I’m seeing fandom. Specifically in the sense that fandom is the creation of a game out of a static property. This game consists not only of “creating” the fic, art and “meta” that make up the currency of the fan community (and provides reward in the form of reviews and notoriety), but of “discovering” the rules of fannish interaction-both with the text and with other fans. Whatever the content of the “fanned” property of at least relatively fixed canon, there is a complex series of interactions which expand our involvement with it, and create the sort of fictional world Johnson’s talking about with video games. In this construction, the fictional world isn’t really the universe of the tv show or film or novel-it’s the one we make right here, together. We have our own reward system, our own currency, our own geography and social system.
In other words, SimFandom.