You Are What You Watch: How Movies and TV Affect Everything - Hardcover

by Walter Hickey (Author)

Pulitzer Prize-winning author and data expert Walt Hickey explains the power of entertainment to change our biology, our beliefs, how we see ourselves, and how nations gain power.

Virtually anyone who has ever watched a profound movie, a powerful TV show, or read a moving novel understands that entertainment can and does affect us in surprising and significant ways. But did you know that our most popular forms of entertainment can have a direct physical effect on us, a measurable impact on society, geopolitics, the economy, and even the future itself? In You Are What You Watch, Walter Hickey, Pulitzer Prize winner and former chief culture writer at acclaimed data site FiveThirtyEight.com, proves how exactly how what we watch (and read and listen to) has a far greater effect on us and the world at large than we imagine.

Employing a mix of research, deep reporting, and 100 data visualizations, Hickey presents the true power of entertainment and culture. From the decrease in shark populations after Jaws to the increase in women and girls taking up archery following The Hunger Games, You Are What You Watch proves its points not just with research and argument, but hard data. Did you know, for example, that crime statistics prove that violent movies actually lead to less real-world violence? And that the international rise of anime and Manga helped lift the Japanese economy out of the doldrums in the 1980s? Or that British and American intelligence agencies actually got ideas from the James Bond movies?

In You Are What You Watch, readers will be given a nerdy, and sobering, celebration of popular entertainment and its surprising power to change the world.

Back Jacket

You probably haven't encountered many books like You Are What You Watch. It convinced me that we take pop culture too much for granted, and the footprint it leaves in everything from our bodily health to how we name our kids.
--Nate Silver, founder of acclaimed data site FiveThirtyEight

The average American spends more than a fifth of their life watching movies and TV, reading books, and listening to music. Consuming media, in other words. We tend to dismiss this as mere diversion, as if when we walk out of a theater we go back to being exactly who we were. In fact, the opposite is the case. The media we consume, and the act of consuming it, has incontrovertible effects on people, on culture--on the world--that are complex, fascinating, profound, and unexpected.

In You Are What You Watch, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Walt Hickey explores exactly how this thing we blithely call "entertainment" has such a tremendous effect on us. Through compelling reporting and research and the creation of dozens and dozens of colorful data visuals, Hickey shows how something like a movie or TV show not only has a direct physical effect on the viewer--how the chemistry of our breath changes with a movie's ups and downs, or a scary scene can be literally bloodcurdling--but also has a measurable impact on society, politics, the economy, and even the future.

Some effects are simply happy--look at the correlation between characters' names and the trends in baby names. Some quite sad--shark populations sharply decreased after Jaws. Some prove that there's a blurry line between fiction and reality--both British and American spy services have poached ideas from the James Bond franchise. Some are so direct that the film feels like an advertisement--navy recruitment rates shot up after Top Gun. And some are so counterintuitive that they bring fresh insights to the deeper currents in our world--like how violent movies can actually lead to less real-world violence (because people who sit in theaters watching violent movies aren't out on the streets committing crimes).

From how media, and not NASA, got Americans to believe in space travel to the surprising light professional wrestling sheds on creative work environments, You Are What You Watch tells truths that are even more compelling than the made-up stories that inspired them.

Author Biography

WALT HICKEY writes Numlock News, a daily stat-based newsletter full of fascinating stories about everything from art heists to lost cities to MoviePass. He is a deputy editor at Insider for data and analysis. Formerly, he was chief culture writer at FiveThirtyEight. He won a 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Illustrated Reporting.