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Instead, you hear dire stories of addiction, violence, mindless escapism. “All across the political spectrum,” television legend Steve Allen writes in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, “thoughtful observers are appalled by what passes for TV entertainment these days. No one can claim that the warning cries are simply the exaggerations of conservative spoil-sports or fundamentalist preachers…. The sleaze and classless garbage on TV in recent years exceeds the boundaries of what has traditionally been referred to as Going Too Far.” The influential Parents Television Council argues: “The entertainment industry has pushed the content envelope too far; television and films filled with sex, violence, and profanity send strong negative messages to the youth of America—messages that will desensitize them and make for a far more disenfranchised society as these youths grow into adults.” And then there’s syndicated columnist Suzanne Fields: “The television sitcom is emblematic of our culture; parents, no matter what their degree of education, have abandoned the simplest standard of shame. Their children literally ‘do not know better.’ The drip, drip, drip of the popular culture dulls our senses. An open society with high technology exposes increasing numbers of adults and children to the lowest common denomination of sex and violence.” You could fill an encyclopedia volume with all the kindred essays published in the past decade.
    Exceptions to this dire assessment exist, but they are of the rule-proving variety. You’ll see the occasional grudging acknowledgments of minor silver linings: an article will suggest that video games enhance visual memory skills, or a critic will hail The West Wing as the rare flowering of thoughtful programming in the junkyard of prime-time television. But the dominant motif is one of decline and atrophy: we’re a nation of reality program addicts and Nintendo freaks. Lost in that account is the most interesting trend of all: that the popular culture has been growing increasingly complex over the past few decades, exercising our minds in powerful new ways.
    But to see the virtue in this form of positive brainwashing, we need to begin by doing away with the tyranny of the morality play. When most op-ed writers and talk show hosts discuss the social value of media, when they address the question of whether today’s media is or isn’t good for us, the underlying assumption is that entertainment improves us when it carries a healthy message. Shows that promote smoking or gratuitous violence are bad for us, while those that thunder against teen pregnancy or intolerance have a positive role in society. Judged by that morality play standard, the story of popular culture over the past fifty years—if not five hundred—is a story of steady decline: the morals of the stories have grown darker and more ambiguous, and the anti-heroes have multiplied.
    The usual counterargument here is that what media has lost in moral clarity it has gained in realism. The real world doesn’t come in nicely packaged public service announcements, and we’re better off with entertainment that reflects that fallen state with all its ethical ambiguity. I happen to be sympathetic to that argument, but it’s not the one I want to make here. I think there is another way to assess the social virtue of pop culture, one that looks at media as a kind of cognitive workout, not as a series of life lessons. Those dice baseball games I immersed myself in didn’t contain anything resembling moral instruction, but they nonetheless gave me a set of cognitive tools that I continue to rely on, nearly thirty years later. There may indeed be more “negative messages” in the mediasphere today, as the Parents Television Council believes. But that’s not the only way to evaluate whether our television shows or video games are having a positive