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Everything Bad is Good for You
clampe writes "
In Everything Bad Is Good For You: How Today's Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter, Steven Johnson tries to convince the reader that video games, television and the Internet are good for us, despite critics who talk about "vast Wastelands" and "infantilized societies". The book raises interesting questions, but in the end is a lightweight analysis that is better for engendering sound bites on NPR and The Daily Show than for convincing serious readers." Read on for Clampes' review.
Everything Bad Is Good For You: How Today's Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter
author
Steven Johnson
pages
238
publisher
Riverhead Books
rating
7
reviewer
clampe
ISBN
1-57322-307-7
summary
Popular culture may have a role in making people smarter
In "Everything Bad Is Good For You" Johnson argues that major forms of entertainment like television, video games, films and the Internet have grown increasingly complex over the past several decades, which corresponds to an increase in average IQ scores in the U.S.
The introduction to the book summarizes cultural criticisms about the growing banality of entertainment, focusing mostly on television. Johnson uses this springboard to state his thesis: that popular culture is not only growing more complex, but that the complexity is making consumers of pop culture more intelligent.
The main content of the book is divided into two main parts, with the first arguing that video games, television, the Internet and movies have grown more complex in recent years, and the second part outlining the relationship between those forms of entertainment and increased intelligence.
Johnson claims that the complexity of problem solving and exploration involved in current video games help players learn critical thinking skills. He amusingly asks the readers to consider a world where video games have been around for centuries and a new technology called the book is all the rage. The cultural critics currently bagging on video games would claim books are static, isolating and understimulating. Johnson is the first to admit he's usng hyperbole here, and books obviously have value, but the point is made. Video games, he points out, cannot be directly compared to books in terms of the types of intelligence they encourage. Video games, according to Johnson, are valuable because they force players to make choices, solve problems, keep track of varied situations and in some cases cooperate with others.
Criticizing television is a popular straw man activity for cultural critics. The boob-tube, the idiot box, the vast wasteland. Johnson argues that while the general thinking is TV has gotten worse over the past 30 years, it in fact has become much better. Current shows have more complex narratives, trust viewers to catch subtle references and have denser social networks. Johnson compares "Dragnet" to "Starsky and Hutch" to "Hill Street Blues" to "The Sopranos" to show the evolving complexity of narratives in television dramas. Even reality TV, the easiest target around, is more complex compared to it's historical antecedent, the game show.
The Internet is valuable in three ways according to Johnson: by virtue of being participatory, by forcing users to learn new interfaces and by creating new channels for social interaction. Johnson provides a laundry list of online interactions that bring people together and make them smarter.
Johnson gives a "qualified yes" to the proposition that movies have undergone the same transformation as television. His main evidence is the increase in the number of characters to be found in "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy compared to the original "Star Wars" trilogy. The other main evidence is the development of a sub-genre of films he calls "mind-benders" typified by Kaufman works like "Being John Malkovich".
In Part 2 of the book, Johnson associates research that shows American IQ scores have risen over the past several decades (the Flynn Effect) with the increased complexity of popular culture. He looks at alternative explanations for this trend, such as nutrition and education, dismissing each in favor of the popular culture explanation.
The Good:
There is something about people who say they never watch TV that makes me want to punch them. I'm also a little tired of having to explain at dinner parties and family gatherings that my playing video games does not mean I went ahead with the lobotomy. Johnson seems to have tapped into a real feeling that television and games are not the worthless pastimes that popular media decries them as. The book raises interesting and important questions, while providing a tonic against cultural nay-sayers.
As in previous works like Emergence, Johnson has an engaging and approachable writing style. He blends personal experience and decent explanations of the literature to craft his arguments in an engaging manner.
The Bad:
The main problem with this book is the strength of the claims made in Part 2. Human intelligence is a complex mechanism affected by a blend of genetic and environmental factors. It is possible that games and television play a role in positively affecting intelligence, but Johnson has not strongly made that case here. The data he presents, while intriguing, are correlational at best and arbitrary at worst. Johnson is actually careful to qualify the populations he considers to be affected by popular culture, and the kinds of intelligence he is talking about. However, the arguments still hang together on fragile strings of "It could be" and "it's not like because of this".
For example, it could be that his selection of television shows to compare biases his analysis. What Johnson says about the increased complexity of television narratives seems intuitively true, but there's danger in the kind of analysis where shows are plucked with no clear selection mechanism from the past and we draw such sweeping conclusions from them.
There are also several alternative explanations to the trends pointed out in this book. For example, let's assume that there is more worthwhile television than there used to be. However, the real comparison should be between worthwhile television compared over the total amount of television available. Given the explosion of television programming since Starsky and Hutch, it's not surprising that better shows are available. Another explanation might be the maturation of the media. Literature is the gold standard here to some extent, but the novel is an older media form that has had many opportunities to attract good authors than television and video games. Over the centuries that we've had novels, we accumulated some talented authors, and those luminaries attract other talented individuals. Television and video games are a newer media, and consequently haven't accumulated as many giants. Some of Johnson's examples of the new complexity in television and film are really examples of a couple of special individuals, like Aaron Sorkin and Charlie Kaufman, attracted to an increasingly mature art form.
The above counter-examples show some of the dangers of this case based argumentation at the center of this book. By using pseudo-case studies, there isn't really a basis by which the data presented by Johnson is stronger than "because I said so." Work that would help his argument has been done in communication studies, developmental psychology and cognitive psychology, but those fields are largely ignored here. Instead, cranky old guys like Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman are set up as straw men. This disconnect reminds of how well Howard Rheingold incorporates current research into popular press efforts like this book. Johnson does use some decent resources like James Paul Gee, and seems to be widely read in several cogent fields, but it doesn't seem reflected as well as might be expected in the actual text.
The sections on the Internet and movies are clumsy and seem almost to be afterthoughts to the other sections. The section on video games is stronger, and the book would have been better by concentrating on that element of the story alone. May not have had as cool a title though.
Final recommendation:
This book is fun, light reading. It's not bad as a catalyst for discussion at parties, but as a serious polemic argument it doesn't hold up. Still, the book is a good airplane read, or something for the hammock. But you're better off playing a video game."
You can purchase Everything Bad Is Good For You: How Today's Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
In "Everything Bad Is Good For You" Johnson argues that major forms of entertainment like television, video games, films and the Internet have grown increasingly complex over the past several decades, which corresponds to an increase in average IQ scores in the U.S.
The introduction to the book summarizes cultural criticisms about the growing banality of entertainment, focusing mostly on television. Johnson uses this springboard to state his thesis: that popular culture is not only growing more complex, but that the complexity is making consumers of pop culture more intelligent.
The main content of the book is divided into two main parts, with the first arguing that video games, television, the Internet and movies have grown more complex in recent years, and the second part outlining the relationship between those forms of entertainment and increased intelligence.
Johnson claims that the complexity of problem solving and exploration involved in current video games help players learn critical thinking skills. He amusingly asks the readers to consider a world where video games have been around for centuries and a new technology called the book is all the rage. The cultural critics currently bagging on video games would claim books are static, isolating and understimulating. Johnson is the first to admit he's usng hyperbole here, and books obviously have value, but the point is made. Video games, he points out, cannot be directly compared to books in terms of the types of intelligence they encourage. Video games, according to Johnson, are valuable because they force players to make choices, solve problems, keep track of varied situations and in some cases cooperate with others.
Criticizing television is a popular straw man activity for cultural critics. The boob-tube, the idiot box, the vast wasteland. Johnson argues that while the general thinking is TV has gotten worse over the past 30 years, it in fact has become much better. Current shows have more complex narratives, trust viewers to catch subtle references and have denser social networks. Johnson compares "Dragnet" to "Starsky and Hutch" to "Hill Street Blues" to "The Sopranos" to show the evolving complexity of narratives in television dramas. Even reality TV, the easiest target around, is more complex compared to it's historical antecedent, the game show.
The Internet is valuable in three ways according to Johnson: by virtue of being participatory, by forcing users to learn new interfaces and by creating new channels for social interaction. Johnson provides a laundry list of online interactions that bring people together and make them smarter.
Johnson gives a "qualified yes" to the proposition that movies have undergone the same transformation as television. His main evidence is the increase in the number of characters to be found in "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy compared to the original "Star Wars" trilogy. The other main evidence is the development of a sub-genre of films he calls "mind-benders" typified by Kaufman works like "Being John Malkovich".
In Part 2 of the book, Johnson associates research that shows American IQ scores have risen over the past several decades (the Flynn Effect) with the increased complexity of popular culture. He looks at alternative explanations for this trend, such as nutrition and education, dismissing each in favor of the popular culture explanation.
The Good:
There is something about people who say they never watch TV that makes me want to punch them. I'm also a little tired of having to explain at dinner parties and family gatherings that my playing video games does not mean I went ahead with the lobotomy. Johnson seems to have tapped into a real feeling that television and games are not the worthless pastimes that popular media decries them as. The book raises interesting and important questions, while providing a tonic against cultural nay-sayers.
As in previous works like Emergence, Johnson has an engaging and approachable writing style. He blends personal experience and decent explanations of the literature to craft his arguments in an engaging manner.
The Bad:
The main problem with this book is the strength of the claims made in Part 2. Human intelligence is a complex mechanism affected by a blend of genetic and environmental factors. It is possible that games and television play a role in positively affecting intelligence, but Johnson has not strongly made that case here. The data he presents, while intriguing, are correlational at best and arbitrary at worst. Johnson is actually careful to qualify the populations he considers to be affected by popular culture, and the kinds of intelligence he is talking about. However, the arguments still hang together on fragile strings of "It could be" and "it's not like because of this".
For example, it could be that his selection of television shows to compare biases his analysis. What Johnson says about the increased complexity of television narratives seems intuitively true, but there's danger in the kind of analysis where shows are plucked with no clear selection mechanism from the past and we draw such sweeping conclusions from them.
There are also several alternative explanations to the trends pointed out in this book. For example, let's assume that there is more worthwhile television than there used to be. However, the real comparison should be between worthwhile television compared over the total amount of television available. Given the explosion of television programming since Starsky and Hutch, it's not surprising that better shows are available. Another explanation might be the maturation of the media. Literature is the gold standard here to some extent, but the novel is an older media form that has had many opportunities to attract good authors than television and video games. Over the centuries that we've had novels, we accumulated some talented authors, and those luminaries attract other talented individuals. Television and video games are a newer media, and consequently haven't accumulated as many giants. Some of Johnson's examples of the new complexity in television and film are really examples of a couple of special individuals, like Aaron Sorkin and Charlie Kaufman, attracted to an increasingly mature art form.
The above counter-examples show some of the dangers of this case based argumentation at the center of this book. By using pseudo-case studies, there isn't really a basis by which the data presented by Johnson is stronger than "because I said so." Work that would help his argument has been done in communication studies, developmental psychology and cognitive psychology, but those fields are largely ignored here. Instead, cranky old guys like Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman are set up as straw men. This disconnect reminds of how well Howard Rheingold incorporates current research into popular press efforts like this book. Johnson does use some decent resources like James Paul Gee, and seems to be widely read in several cogent fields, but it doesn't seem reflected as well as might be expected in the actual text.
The sections on the Internet and movies are clumsy and seem almost to be afterthoughts to the other sections. The section on video games is stronger, and the book would have been better by concentrating on that element of the story alone. May not have had as cool a title though.
Final recommendation:
This book is fun, light reading. It's not bad as a catalyst for discussion at parties, but as a serious polemic argument it doesn't hold up. Still, the book is a good airplane read, or something for the hammock. But you're better off playing a video game."
You can purchase Everything Bad Is Good For You: How Today's Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Fo' shizzle!
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
... In moderation. As for everything if you go out of wack *anything* even what is normaly good for you will be bad for you.... Very bad. Think : Sugar /lipid /protein. Good for you, allow you to live , make up hormons and other good stuff , make up protein. Eat too much of it and you get an host of associated illness... Vitamins are the same. Eat too much vitam C and byebye kidney. Each too much A... TV, Internet, Game and so on are the same. Moderation is the key here.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
> The greatest attrocities in mankind's history
> have been in the name of religion.
What religion was Stalin acting in the name of?
Or Hitler?
Or Pol Pot?
Or Mao?
Or the settlers who killed most of the Native Americans?
Or...
Blind faith that all the world's problems have been caused by religion is even less rational than blind faith in religion. A fundamentalist extremist is a nutjob, regardless of whether he's a religious nutjob or an atheistic nutjob; take care you don't edge into the latter.