Free Everything Bad Is Good for You by Steven Johnson Page B

you have been following the season closely, you’ll still find yourself straining to keep track of the plot, precisely because so many relationships are at play.
    The map of 24’ s social network actually understates the cognitive work involved in parsing the show. As a conspiracy narrative—and one that features several prominent “moles”—each episode invariably suggests what we might call phantom relationships between characters, a social connection that is deliberately not shown onscreen, but that viewers inevitably ponder in their own minds. In this episode of 24, Jack Bauer’s wife, Teri, suffers from temporary amnesia and spends some time under the care of a new character, Dr. Parslow, about which the viewer knows nothing. The show offers no direct connection to the archvillain, Victor Drazen, but in watching Parslow comfort Teri, you compulsively look for clues that might connect him to Drazen. (The same kind of scrutiny follows all the characters at CTU, because of the mole plot.) In 24, following the plot is not merely keeping track of all the dots that the show connects for you; the allure of the show also lies in weighing potential connections even if they haven’t been deliberately mapped onscreen. Needless to say, Dallas marks all its social relationships with indelible ink; the shock of the “Who shot JR?” season finale lay precisely in the fact that a social connection—between JR and his would-be assassin—was for once not explicitly spelled out by the show.
    Once again, the long-term trend of the Sleeper Curve is clear: one of the most complex social networks on popular television in the seventies looks practically infantile next to the social networks of today’s hit dramas. The modern viewer who watches Dallas on DVD will be bored by the content—not just because the show is less salacious than today’s soap operas (which it is by a small margin) but because the show contains far less information in each scene. With Dallas, you don’t have to think to make sense of what’s going on, and not having to think is boring. 24 takes the opposite approach, layering each scene with a thick network of affiliations. You have to focus to follow the plot, and in focusing you’re exercising the part of your brain that maps social networks. The content of the show may be about revenge killings and terrorist attacks, but the collateral learning involves something altogether different, and more nourishing. It’s about relationships.
    T HE I NTERNET
    V IEWERS WHO GET LOST in 24’ s social network have a resource available to them that Dallas viewers lacked: the numerous online sites and communities that share information about popular television shows. Just as Apprentice viewers mulled Troy’s shady business ethics in excruciating detail, 24 fans exhaustively document and debate every passing glance and brief allusion in the series, building detailed episode guides and lists of Frequently Asked Questions. One Yahoo! site featured at the time of this writing more than forty thousand individual posts from ordinary viewers, contributing their own analysis of last night’s episode, posting questions about plot twists, or speculating on the upcoming season. As the shows have complexified, the resources for making sense of that complexity have multiplied as well. If you’re lost in 24’ s social network, you can always get your bearings online.
    All of which brings us to another crucial piece in the puzzle of the Sleeper Curve: the Internet. Not just because the online world offers resources that help sustain more complex programming in other media, but because the process of acclimating to the new reality of networked communications has had a salutary effect on our minds. We do well to remind ourselves how quickly the industrialized world has embraced the many forms of participatory electronic media—from e-mail to hypertext to