Wander down the abandoned alleys of Trotskyism and there is no telling where you might turn up: on Main Street with contemporary neoconservatives, on campuses with respected literary critics or on the margins of the margins, where political savants probe the zeitgeist. In one of those quarters lived Josef Weber, a forgotten essayist who pondered, among other things, popular culture, which did not please him. To establish its impact, Weber in a 1957 essay posited a law of the dwindling force of cognition in bourgeois society.

Weber's law suggested that despite vast growth in scientific and technological information, knowledge of society declines. People increasingly know about things and decreasingly about social reality. Later reformulated as the law of the falling rate of intelligence, it posits that intelligence sinks in society as the production, selling and advertising of commodities rises. We face a crisis of the overproduction of idiocy. These notions represent a classic stance about the dumbing-down of popular culture. Cases in point: The most popular sporting event in the United States is the Indianapolis 500, in which nearly half a million people pay good money to watch grown men drive fast automobiles in a circle. Viewers by the millions follow contestants on reality television as they compete to eat bugs and worms.

Steven Johnson, a savvy writer on technology and its pleasures, offers a thoroughgoing challenge to this bleak outlook on popular culture. To be sure, Johnson's contrariness may be a pose, inasmuch as it depends on opposition that has all but melted away. Apart from a few depressed followers of Josef Weber and his ilk, who today believes in falling cognition? Champions of popular culture can be found throughout this broad land. One need not venture very far to discover courses on soap operas, situation comedies or Star Trek offered by cultural studies professors, who wax about the profundity of television. To be sure, doubt about the legitimacy of their subject matter haunts even the most avid boosters of popular culture. I sometimes ask my students a variant of an Internet dating question: Whom would you rather date, someone who indicates their favorite pastime is to stay home to play video games or to step out to a ballet or museum? Even the most avid enthusiasts of television balk at dating their soul mates.

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