In Watching TV Makes You Smarter adapted from his book “Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter”, Steven Johnson identifies the increasingly complex narrative structures that we’ve become accustomed to in series television. Compare the density of plot and character in Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Wire, The Shield, or Lost with The Rockford Files, Adam-12, or Gunsmoke. Pop culture reveals a maturing in our appetite for stories. This voraciousness continues to grow, with social media emerging to deliver us stories in all shapes and sizes. We get big stories from blogs; miniature stories via Twitter; multimedia stories on flickr and YouTube. All of them are equipped with handles to make it easy for us to retell the narrative to others (something we’ve dubbed “viral”)…