Read Online Everything Bad Is Good for You by Steven Johnson - Free Book Online

content. Part of this neglect stems from the age-old opposition between intelligence and emotion: intelligence is following a chess match or imparting a sophisticated rhetorical argument on a matter of public policy; emotions are the province of soap operas. But countless studies have demonstrated the pivotal role that emotional intelligence plays in seemingly high-minded arenas: business, law, politics. Any profession that involves regular interaction with other people will place a high premium on mind reading and emotional IQ. Of all the media available to us today, television is uniquely suited for conveying the fine gradients of these social skills. A book will give you a better vista of an individual’s life story, and a newspaper op-ed is a better format for a rigorous argument, but if you’re trying to evaluate a given person’s emotional IQ and you don’t have the option of sitting down with them in person, the tight focus of television is your best bet. Reality programming has simply recognized that intrinsic strength and built a whole genre around it.
    Politics, too, has gravitated toward the television medium’s emotional fluency. This is often derided as a coarsening or sentimentalizing of the political discourse, turning the rational debate over different political agendas into a Jerry Springer confessional. The days of the Lincoln–Douglas debates have given way to “Boxers or briefs?” The late Neil Postman described this sorry trend as the show-businessification of politics in his influential 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves to Death. In Postman’s view, television is a medium of cosmetics, of surfaces, an endless replay of the Nixon–Kennedy debates, where the guy with the best makeup always wins. “Although the Constitution makes no mention of it, it would appear that fat people are now effectively excluded from running for high political office,” he writes. “Probably bald people as well. Almost certainly those whose looks are not significantly enhanced by the cosmetician’s art. Indeed, we may have reached the point where cosmetics has replaced ideology as the field of expertise over which a politician must have competent control.”
    No doubt some of what Postman says is true, though Bill Clinton did manage to eke out a successful political career while battling a minor weight problem. Television lets you see the physical characteristics of the people you’re voting for with an accuracy unrivaled by any medium to date. To be sure, this means that physically repulsive individuals have suffered on election day. (Of course, it also means a commander in chief will no longer be able to conceal from the American people the simple fact that he can’t walk. )
    But the visibility of the medium extends beyond hairstyles and skin tone. When we see our politicians in the global living room of televised intimacy, we’re able to detect more profound qualities in them: not just their grooming, but their emotional antennae—their ability to connect, outfox, condemn, or console. We see them as emotional mind readers, and there are few qualities in an individual more predictive of their ability to govern a country, because mind reading is so central to the art of persuasion. Presidents make formal appearances and sit for portraits and host galas, but their day-to-day job is motivating and persuading other people to follow their lead. To motivate and persuade you have to have an innate radar for other people’s mental states. For an ordinary voter, it’s almost impossible to get a sense for a given candidate’s emotional radar without seeing them in person, in an unscripted setting. You can’t get a sense of a candidate’s mind reading skills by watching them give a memorized stump speech, or seeing their thirty-second ads, or God knows reading their campaign blog posts. But what does give you that kind of information is the