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Tavis: Steven Johnson is a best-selling author whose previous books include 'Mind Wide Open' and 'Interface Culture.' He also writes the emerging technology column for 'Discover' magazine and is a contributor to 'Slate' and the 'New York Times.' When's this guy sleep? Wow. His latest book is one of the most talked about of the year, 'Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter,' even though my mama ain't buyin' that. Steven Johnson joins us tonight from New York City. Steven, nice to have you on.

Steven Johnson: Thank you. It's good to be here.

Tavis: So my mom ain't buyin' this, Steven.

Johnson: Well, you know, she needs to read it again, then. If she spends some more time with the book, I think she'll pick up on it.

Tavis: Tell me where the notion came from to write a book entitled 'Everything Bad is Good for You'?

Johnson: Well, it's really, you know, as the subtitle says, it's really about popular culture. It's looking specifically at the last 30 years of pop culture, and it's trying to look at it from the perspective of--not in terms of the values conversation that we've been having or in terms of the violence or the obscenity, but really the question of how much thinking, what kind of thinking do you have to do in order to make sense of your average television show or play your average video game? And if you look at pop culture from that angle, what you find is over the last 30 years, in fact, the culture's gotten much more complex and mentally challenging, and not, you know, dumbing us down as everybody thinks.

Tavis: Although the suggestion in that statement, though, is that you can separate those two things, when there are many who believe that that is impossible. And those two very notions are inextricably linked.

Johnson: Well, I think--I'm sympathetic to that argument, and there may be some people who come away from the book thinking, "OK, I accept his idea that the culture is making us smarter on some level in terms of problem-solving and in terms of kind of I.Q.-like intelligence, but the values are still so bad that it's not worth it in the end," and I would disagree with that argument, but I would accept that. The problem is nobody's talking about this kind of cognitive side that I'm trying to talk about in the book. Everybody's been talking about the values, but everybody's been ignoring this incredible new complexity that's going on in the culture, and so it was time, I think, that somebody, you know, stood up and actually tried to argue for the positive things that were happening so that we can at least focus on those for a change.

Tavis: I want to get to the arguments that you make in the book in just a second, Steven. Let me ask one other overarching question, if I might. If in fact everything bad for us is actually good for us, I'm wondering how--where the evidence of that is because when one looks around and sees that the United States is no longer the world's leading manufacturer, that our education system is in the tanks--we got this debate every day about the future of public education. I can list, as you well know--you know the list better than I do--a litany of arenas and areas where the U.S. is no longer number one, and yet, even if you're right that these things essentially make us smarter, where's the evidence of that?

Johnson: Well, there are a couple of things. First, you can look at--I mean, the news isn't as bad as we sometimes tell ourselves it is. One of the things I talk about in the book is that I.Q. scores have been rising steadily and have actually been accelerating their rise in the U.S. over the last 10 or 15 years, so by that basic--it's not the only measure of intelligence, but it's an important measure of intelligence, and by that standard, in fact we're getting smarter. The other point of it is, look at our success in precisely the areas that in a sense I'm talking about in the book in terms of information and technology and computer networks and all that stuff. We continue to lead the world in all of those fields. Yes, we are not as important in terms of manufacturing machines as we used to be, but in terms of the idea world of information technology and the web, the world looks to us and continues to look to us.

Tavis: But let me stick with this education point, though, again before I get to the arguments you make in the book. If we were looking just at education, since you mentioned I.Q., it seems to me that one measure of I.Q. is how students are performing in the classroom. Now, I'm not here--I don't have the data in front of me. I'm not here to cast aspersion on American high school students, or junior high for that matter, but if what I am hearing, if what I am to read, I am to believe as truth, then one still is looking for the evidence of how, even with the arguments you made in this book, we are a smarter society. I guess, the question is, if we are a smarter society and we don't get nothin' for it, what does it mean?

Johnson: Right, well, I mean, there's a difference between a well-educated society and a smart society in the sense that there's kind of basic kind of intellectual cognitive tools that you have, and then there's your kind of wisdom and your knowledge about the world, your knowledge of history and so on and so forth. Now, I don't think kids are getting wisdom, they're not getting knowledge of history from pop culture, but they are getting these kind of basic building block tools, and I think that that's good news because 30 years ago--I mean, I grew up in the seventies, and I was just sitting around and watching 'The Dukes of Hazzard' on television. I wasn't getting anything from pop culture.

Tavis: Daisy Duke.

Johnson: Yeah. Besides Daisy Duke--that was the one thing you got. So I'm not saying by any means, you know, "Kids, don't do your homework," and we shouldn't--I'm not saying we shouldn't try to improve our schools, but I'm saying there is some positive value coming out of what the kids are doing with their spare time, and then, you know, that doesn't mean as educators and as parents we shouldn't be working to teach our kids all these other things that the culture isn't giving them.

Tavis: Well, I think this book is on the best-seller list because kids are buying it for their parents. So let me--let me play the role of a child, those who put this book, I suspect, on the best-seller list and throw some things at you so you can educate my mother and other parents watching right now about how this stuff that they perceive that is bad for us, for their kids, for their grandkids, is in fact good for them. Let me start with video games. Give me your best--give me the argument you make in the book about how video games aren't really as bad for kids as we think they are.

Johnson: Well, the first thing that has to be said about video games is that they have gotten incredibly difficult. If you sit down and play one of these games--and I encourage parents to sit down and play some of these games with their kids. You will find first off that you are massively confused by what's going on because there are a huge number of variables, there are a huge number of objectives, there's an immense kind of sophistication to the patterns that you have to recognize to solve these things, and they are not about running around, pushing buttons, and shooting things as fast as you can. There are a few violent video games that are always near the top of the charts, but in general, the best-selling video games of all time are non-violent, involve huge amounts of patience, strategy, long-term thinking and most importantly, decision making, so the Sims is the most popular game of all time, right? And in the Sims, you sit there and you manage a little virtual family, and you have to clean up after your dinner, and you have to do chores, and you have to balance the budget, and you have to manage all these different resources and keep track of everybody's needs, and it's a great educational tool, and it's really fun.

Tavis: I'm afraid to ask this question. Thankfully, I'm on PBS, so I think I may be covered in this regard, but tell me why television isn't really that bad for kids. There's good stuff on television, you argue.

Johnson: Yeah, I mean, the question is really, again, this question of the trend because the first thing that I'm trying to do is intervene in this assumption that everything has gotten worse, and so, if you look at television over the last 30 years and look at the complexity of the stories that are now being told, everything from 'The Sopranos' to 'Lost' to even some of the better reality shows, the number of separate plot lines, the amount of the kind of dialogue you have to take in on a show like 'The West Wing,' for instance, the subtlety of the storytelling, the amount of information you have to remember from past episodes. By all these measures, the shows are much more challenging and complex than the shows I was watching, you know, when I was 8, compared to 'The Dukes of Hazzard' and 'Fantasy Island' and 'The A-Team' and all these other shows, that television has really gotten a lot better and more challenging. And so, I'm not sure if TV is actually making us smarter. I think that the games and the interactive media and the Internet, that in fact is really enhancing some of our faculties, but television has gotten smarter. That's the argument that I would make in the book.

Tavis: Let's talk about the Internet since you just mentioned it. Most parents would agree that there is a lot of good, clearly, that comes from the Internet, but increasingly, there are any number of salacious uses of the Internet. Tell me why you think on balance, though, that said, the Internet is good for us and it is making us smarter.

Johnson: Yeah, as a parent, you have to be careful because the Internet--its power is that it's so completely open and that means that it's open to anything, including some really dark things that you want to shield your kids from, but the crucial shift here both in games an on the Internet is towards media in a sense that you help control, that you get to shape, that you get to make decisions actively and participating in, so the idea that these kids are able to kind of write their own story of their lives and post it onto their web blog on the Internet and share it with people and make connections to people all around the world and actually get their voice out there in public and it's not just for kids. I mean, it's an amazing thing for grownups to be able to do as well. The explosion of self-published web sites out there is really an amazing thing, so it's no longer this kind of classic mass media situation where you just sit there and you listen to what the 3 networks tell you what to think. You actually get out there and argue and debate and participate in a really active way.

Tavis: I know the book is not about this, and you established that point at the top of our conversation and I paid attention to that, made note of it, but let me ask you anyway, just 'cause I'm curious. How it is, in your mind, at least, you juxtapose these bad things in fact being good for us with the steady moral decline, the lack of values that we seem to have in our society? How do you juxtapose those 2 things?

Johnson: Well, I guess, Tavis, I would disagree with the assumption that the values have gotten so much worse because if you look around, there are a number of indications, particularly over the last 10 or 15 years. I mean, the most telling thing, when you think about violence, for instance, there's no question that media has gotten more explicitly violent in terms of, you know, the bloodshed that you see--

Tavis: And so have kids. You have 9-year-olds stabbing 11-year-olds, Steven.

Johnson: But the trend in society, we have just lived through the single most dramatic drop in violent crime, particularly among juveniles, in our country's history. It is true there are stories out there of the 9-year-olds stabbing other kids, and there's no question that that does happen, but the long-term trend in the society is a really remarkable reversal of the violence that grew in the seventies and the eighties, and that has subsided in a really pretty dramatic way despite the fact that the media has grown more violent, so I question the assumption that violent media leads directly to violent behavior. I think in general, the forces that affect violent behavior in this society are different from just what we would see on our screens.

Tavis: I'm gonna get a ton of e-mail on that, and I'm gonna send all of it to you, Steven, every bit of it.

Johnson: I brought it on myself, you know.

Tavis: Let me offer this as a closing question. I assume, though, that even though these other forms of media are making us smarter and they're not that bad for us, they are in fact good for us, you argue, I assume, though, since you've written a book, you don't want us to stop readin' books, though?

Johnson: That's right. I have an economic incentive, but also, seriously, an intellectual incentive because this book has started this great conversation and I'm very proud of it, and I could not have started this conversation in any other form. Sitting down with somebody with 220 pages, 240 pages, to argue out this polemic of mine, the book is the perfect medium for that, and so books continue to be relevant, and they should continue to be relevant because they're great for certain kinds of information.

Tavis: And if you think books are relevant, show your love. Go pick up a copy of 'Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter.' You're a smart guy, Steven Johnson. Nice to have you on.

Johnson: Thanks, Tavis, I enjoyed it.

Tavis: All the best to you. Up next on this program, from the Wu-Tang Clan, The RZA. Stay with us.