Despite the widely-held conception that popular culture grows dumber by the year, the truth is actually the opposite. TV, video games, and movies are all vastly more intellectually challenging today than they were a few decades ago. And this is an ongoing trend, with no end in sight. Johnson calls this the "sleeper curve."

First is video games, perhaps the biggest target of critics of popular culture. Rotting minds of America's youth, say many. In fact, video games are some of the healthiest and most intellectually challening material that kids and teenagers encounter. The problem is, Johnson points out, people are trying to judge new forms of media such as games on the same criteria as that old standby, books. Books are about content: rich stories, complex characters. Video games typically have paper-thin storylines and characters: they are about discovery and environment. A large part of what makes games so challenging is that you don't even know the rules when you start. Through a process of probing the environment, making hypothesis, devising experiments, and then applying the feedback of the experiments back to the hypothesis, gamers slowly probe and map out the rules of the game. Games are teaching kids the scientific method, probably better than most elementary school science classes do.

TV is a prime area of increasing complexity. Television shows from a few decades ago tended to be extremely simplistic, with few characters and situational backdrops that hardly changed between episodes. Usually there was only a single storyline followed throughout the entire show. Compare this to today's TV: the Sopranos, 24, the West Wing, Six Feet Under. Watchers are expected to keep track of dozens of complex characters, with interleaving storylines that may reference information from far outside the episode, perhaps even back by years.

Johnson notes that a major driver for this phenomenon is the change in media technology which allows us to watch (and thereby analyze) episodes and movives as much as we want. Shows that have a lot of replay value (i.e., great complexity and many subtle references to decode) will be more popular on TiVo and DVD.

Another great point he makes is the importance of capturing the attention of the mavens. Every field has its mavens, people who are the experts to which everyone else turns. These people are only drawn in when there is sufficient complexity to hold their interest - some might say to obsess. When you have a small group of dedicated fans, these people create a market for you. They create websites, write on their blogs, post to forums about the show. The draw attention to it because people look to these sorts of people to find out what they should be watching. Car buffs guide regular car purchasers because people follow their lead; the same is true with content like TV and movies.

Finally, Johnson counters the oft-cited statistic that people read fewer books today than they did in the recent past by pointing out that people consume less of all media. The reason is that there are so many types of media available to us now - TV, movies, the Internet, books, newspapers, magazines, video games, blogs - that by necessity we do less of each, in order to have a more diverse media diet.