*** Welcome to piglix ***

Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter

Everything Bad Is Good for You
Everything Bad Cover.JPG
Everything Bad Is Good for You Cover
Author Steven Johnson
Cover artist Jamie Keenan
Language English
Subject Popular culture, Cultural studies
Publisher Riverhead
Publication date
May 2005
Pages 272
ISBN
OCLC 69992179
LC Class HM621 .J64 2006

Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter is a non-fiction book written by Steven Johnson. Published in 2005, it is based upon Johnson's theory that popular culture – in particular television programs and video games – has grown more complex and demanding over time and is making society as a whole more intelligent. The book's claims, especially related to the proposed benefits of television, drew media attention. It received mixed critical reviews.

Johnson states that he aims to persuade readers of “two things:

1. By almost all the standards we use to measure reading’s cognitive benefits — attention, memory, following threads, and so on — the nonliterary popular culture has been steadily growing more challenging over the past thirty years.

2. Increasingly, the nonliterary popular culture is honing different mental skills that are just as important as the ones exercised by reading books”

Johnson challenges the precept that pop culture is deteriorating as a result of new media platforms. He derives the term Sleeper Curve from the Woody Allen film Sleeper, where "scientists from 2173 are astounded that twentieth-century society failed to grasp the nutritional merits of cream pies and hot fudge". He uses this to argue against contemporary perception of the deteriorating standards of pop culture, although Johnson is quick to point out that by no means does the Sleeper Curve imply that popular culture has become superior to traditional culture. Johnson utilizes the following media sources to support his argument:

He argues that the appeal of video games is not through their (possibly violent or sexual) content, but rather through the fact that the "structure" of the video games uniquely invites exploration and stimulates the reward centers of the brain. In pointing out arguments for the support of video games, Johnson sheds light on how kids can be more involved in games than in class, but this involvement can teach them that which could be taught in class. To substantiate this argument, he discusses how games and other virtual worlds have immediate rewards, whereas in reality, rewards can take a while to obtain. Johnson states “if you create a system where rewards are both clearly defined and achieved by exploring an environment, you’ll find human brains drawn to those systems, even if they’re made up of virtual characters and simulated sidewalks. It’s not the subject matter of these games that attracts…it’s the reward system”. Finally, he argues for the support of video games because they also require one to make decisions, whereas books and other forms of art may conjure up imagination and emotions but don’t require decision-making.


...
Wikipedia

...