Free Everything Bad Is Good for You by Steven Johnson

of them get along with Mary. This faculty is part of our primate heritage; our closest relatives, the chimpanzees, live in societies characterized by intricate political calculation between dozens of individuals. (Some anthropologists believe that the explosion in frontal lobe size experienced by Homo sapiens over the past million years was spurred by the need to assess densely interconnected social networks.) Environmental conditions can strengthen or weaken the brain’s capacity for this kind of social mapping, just as it can for real-world mapping. A famous study by University College London found that London cabdrivers had, on average, larger regions in the brain dedicated to spatial memory than the ordinary Londoner. And veteran drivers had larger areas than their younger colleagues. This is the magic of the brain’s plasticity: by executing a certain cognitive function again and again, you recruit more neurons to participate in the task. Social intelligence works the same way: spend more hours studying the intricacies of a social network, and your brain will grow more adept at tracking all those intersecting relationships.
    Where media is concerned, this type of analysis is not adequately illustrated by narrative threads or a simple list of characters. It is better visualized as a network: a series of points connected by lines of affiliation. When we watch most reality shows, we are implicitly building these social network maps in our heads, a map not so much of plotlines as of attitudes: Nick has a thing for Amy, but Amy may just be using Nick; Bill and Kwame have a competitive friendship, and both think Amy is using Nick; no one trusts Omarosa, except Kwame, but Troy really doesn’t trust Omarosa. This may sound like high school, but like many forms of emotional intelligence, the ability to analyze and recall the full range of social relationships in a large group is just as reliable a predictor of professional success as your SAT scores or your college grades. Thanks to our biological and cultural heritage, we live in large bands of interacting humans, and people whose minds are skilled at visualizing all the relationships in those bands are likely to thrive, while those whose minds have difficulty keeping track are invariably handicapped. Reality shows force us to exercise that social muscle in ways that would have been unimaginable on past game shows, where the primary cognitive skill tested was the ability to correctly guess the price of a home appliance, or figure out the right time to buy a vowel.
    The trend toward increased social network complexity is not the exclusive province of reality television; many popular television dramas today feature dense webs of relationships that require focus and scrutiny on the part of the viewer just to figure out what’s happening on the screen. Traditionally, the most intricate social networks on television have come in the form of soap operas, with affairs and betrayals and tortured family dynamics. So let’s take as a representative example an episode from season one of Dallas. The social network at the heart of Dallas is ultimately the Ewing family: two parents, three children, two spouses. A few regular characters orbit at the periphery of this constellation: the farmhand Ray, the Ewing nemesis Cliff. Each episode introduces a handful of characters who play a onetime role in that week’s plotline and then disappear from the network. In this episode, “Black Market Baby,” the primary structure of the narrative is a double plot: the competition between the two brothers to have a baby and give the family patriarch a long-overdue grandchild. Imagined purely in narrative terms—along the lines of our Sopranos and Hill Street— this would be a relatively simple structure: two plotlines bouncing back and forth, overlapping at a handful of key moments. But viewed as a social network, it is a more nuanced affair:

    The lighter lines