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

Johnson, Steven

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1573223077 ISBN 13: 9781573223072

Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover, 2005

Synopsis

An analytical argument for the intellectual benefits of popular elements from modern pop culture, including video games and reality TV programs, explains how today's electronic games and television shows have contributed to higher IQ scores and may be helping people to develop improve cognitive abilities.

About this title

About the Author

Steven Johnson is the author of the national bestsellers Everything Bad Is Good for You and Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life, as well as Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software and Interface Culture: How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate.

Reviews

Though the research behind Johnson’s theories proves interesting, most critics found a few quirks in the construction of its delivery. Driven by a fervent desire to prove that today’s media are more beneficial to the human mind than they are damaging, Johnson, author of several books on science and technology (see Mind Wide Open, **** May/June 2004), fails to adequately define his agenda other than showcasing his research. Though his prose is captivating and his enthusiasm infectious, Johnson does not muster enough evidence to prove that today’s games and television shows help one’s mind; and yet, in his defense, there doesn’t seem to be enough evidence proving him wrong. Either way, Everything Bad Is Good for You is a creative, flawed look at a society where the term "reality" refers to television rather than, um, reality.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

I am not a big fan of video games. Having watched friends devote weeks to slaughtering aliens in Halo, I have decided that time spent in virtual worlds is time wasted. It is just this kind of thinking that Steven Johnson tries to counter in Everything Bad Is Good for You. A best-selling science writer who often tackles neuroscientific issues, Johnson argues against the presumption that popular media undermines our intellect. He claims that video games, television and movies are more complex than ever, to the benefit of viewers’ cognitive skills. Whether we are mastering the intricacies of the simulation game SimCity or tracking the multiple plotlines in the TV drama 24, we are "honing ... mental skills that are just as important as the ones exercised by reading books," Johnson writes. The learning does not come from content but from form, Johnson says. Video games, for example, enhance our problem-solving and decision-making skills as we test the limits of a game’s logic; the aliens we are blasting are secondary. After making similar arguments for television, film and the Internet, he proposes that this increasingly challenging media environment may help explain the upward trend in IQ scores. Unfortunately, Johnson uses only a modicum of neuroscience to back up his thesis. Elsewhere, and in the absence of footnotes, his arguments lack rigor. It may be true that a child’s zombie like stare at the TV set is a sign of focus, as he writes, but the positive implication inherent in this statement pales in the face of a large amount of research that links young children’s excessive television viewing with attention, learning and social problems during childhood and teen years. Johnson also addresses video-game violence with more opinion than science. Even though he maintains that content does not matter, he often underplays the violent objectives of popular games. I am not convinced that the cognitive skills derived from building a virtual city equal those gleaned from shooting cops and innocent bystanders. In the end, Johnson has persuaded me that perhaps some of what is bad is good, but certainly not everything.

Aimee Cunningham

Adult/High School–Johnson puts the much-maligned pastime of playing video games under the microscope and comes up with some startling conclusions concerning the intellectual value and cognitive demands of this pop-culture activity. He argues that it isn't the content of today's games that engages the mind and makes one smarter; rather, it is their ever-increasing level of complexity and sophistication that challenges the mind to grow neurologically. One only comes to understand how to play a game by probing the complex interfaces within its levels to see what works as one goes along. Johnson observes that this is much like real life. He urges parents to sit down with their children and play in order to understand just how mentally challenging the games can be. He extends his argument to TV series such as The Sopranos, 24, Six Feet Under, and Law and Order, all of which, he argues, are multi-threaded and require viewers to think in order to follow the increasingly complex character and plot developments. While the book and its arguments endorsing the cognitive challenges of video games and other mass media are thought-provoking and somewhat convincing, Johnson is less successful in convincing readers that video games–especially the more violent ones–are good for a player's mental health. While the book should be of value for reports, don't be surprised if many students can't resist citing it the next time their parents ask why they haven't finished their homework.–Catherine Gilbride, Farifax County Public Library, VA
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Hello. My name is Bob, and I'm a Tetris addict.

It's been eight years since I deleted the computer game from my hard drive, then frantically tried to retrieve it. Eight years since whole afternoons evaporated with nothing to show for them but eyestrain; eight years since I awakened from my Tetris trance to discover morning light leaking through my window.

Now Steven Johnson informs me the experience made me stronger, and he has even better news for fans of today's more sophisticated games. In Everything Bad Is Good For You, Johnson is not talking about hand-eye coordination or reaction times. He claims that video games like SimCity and TV shows like "The Sopranos" give us a "cognitive workout" that buffs the muscles between our ears. We're getting smarter, Johnson says, and the reason is the growing complexity -- the multiple story threads and shifting interpersonal relationships -- of the brain food flickering on our video screens.

If only.

Johnson, who writes for several popular magazines, gets courage points for his daring contrarianism. Finally, an intellectual who doesn't think we're headed down the toilet! Most eggheads have spent years hissing like geese at activities that involve images on a monitor. In the book's most wicked passage, Johnson imagines how the backlash against printed matter might have sounded if video games had come first. Reading is "tragically isolating," Johnson half-jokes. Books understimulate the senses with their "barren string of words on the page" and "fixed linear path" that resist interactive manipulation by the reader.

It's a fun and revelatory thrust, but Johnson wrecks his momentum by swinging too far in the other direction. He seems blind to anything but the rosiest consequences of parking our butts in dark rooms. About the ultra-violence in games like Grand Theft Auto, Johnson says, in effect, "Don't worry." Game content, he argues, is less important than the "collateral learning" that takes place while we're playing. As pop-culture offerings "complexify" (his word), we're getting better at learning how to learn. Johnson never addresses the collateral damage. For example, while Tetris was complexifying my mind, the rest of me was increasifying. Everything Bad Is Good For You contains not a single word about fresh-air alternatives such as scaling a mountain, sketching a portrait or fixing an engine.

Johnson's thesis hinges on the assumption that Americans have gotten smarter. This neglects mounting evidence to the contrary: squeeze yogurt, HMOs, tax breaks for Hummer buyers, routine circumcision, Ashton Kutcher, the National Hockey League. Johnson cites IQ scores, which have been rising three points per decade. For the sake of argument, let's agree that Americans are truly becoming brainiacs. Why credit computer games? Why not the decline in cigarette smoking, or the spreading popularity of yoga, or the higher incidence of interbreeding with more evolved beings from the Planet Zymbzoz?

Okay, that last example is far-fetched. But so is Johnson's assertion that the slack-jawed state that children fall into when mesmerized by the boob tube is a good thing. It's not that they're zombies, he writes. They're simply "focused." So the next time there's a grease fire raging out of control in the kitchen and Kid Sister is so "focused" on Super Robot Monkey Team Hyperforce Go! that she doesn't react to the smoke, it might be because she's too busy piling up IQ points to run for her life.

Perhaps I'm being too harsh. Johnson does come up with the kind of observations interesting enough to regale your friends with, though none of them is central to his point. He notes that in this age of ostensible instant gratification, the best-selling video games are the ones that take the most work to master, and they're popular with young men, a demographic traditionally known for slacking. He says that today's TV shows needed to complexify (okay, I give up) because lucrative DVD sales and cable syndication deals demand programming that stands up to repeat viewings. He claims that popular shows like "24" have borrowed from the best video games, offering little context and requiring viewers to figure out the rules and the relationships between the characters on the fly.

Johnson laments that the positive mental impact of pop culture hasn't been extensively studied, and he's right that we should question our snobby suppositions. But he never convinced me that pop culture is responsible for a more intelligent America. After all, decades before the embarrassingly primitive Tetris, my mother was "focused" on video that offered multiple story threads and shifting interpersonal relationships. Her complexified cognitive workout? "As the World Turns."

Reviewed by Bob Ivry
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

Worried about how much time your children spend playing video games? Don't be, advises Johnson—not only are they learning valuable problem-solving skills, they'd probably do better on an IQ test than you or your parents could at their age. Go ahead and let them watch more television, too, since even reality shows can function as "elaborately staged group psychology experiments" to stimulate rather than pacify the brain. With the same winning combination of personal revelation and friendly scientific explanation he displayed in last year's Mind Wide Open, Johnson shatters the conventional wisdom about pop culture as pabulum, showing how video games, television shows and movies have become increasingly complex. Furthermore, he says, consumers are drawn specifically to those products that require the most mental engagement, from small children who can't get enough of their favorite Disney DVDs to adults who find new layers of meaning with each repeated viewing of Seinfeld. Johnson lays out a strong case that what we do for fun is just as educational in its way as what we study in the classroom (although it's still worthwhile to encourage good reading habits, too). There's an important message here for every parent—one they should hear from the source before savvy kids (especially teens) try to take advantage of it. Agent, Lydia Wills at Paradigm. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

By everything bad Johnson means video games and today's TV, which supposedly stupefy and corrupt their users with repetition and violence. But set aside characters, settings, and other representational content, Johnson says, and consider procedural-systemic content. The games require discovering and employing their rules in increasingly complex situations; new TV, including reality TV, requires construing and remembering relationships among many characters and interpreting developments inferentially from what is learned. Such games and shows teach users how to find "order and meaning in the world" and make "decisions that help create that order." Later Johnson points out that, despite contemporary Cassandras screaming that pop culture and its consumers just get dumber and dumber, average IQ has risen at the same time that games and TV have become increasingly complex. The violent crime rate, the demographic for which overlaps heavily with that for video-game playing, has plummeted, too. Exemplifying from such hits as Sims, Grand Theft Auto, Seinfeld, Survivor, and 24; never disparaging high culture, especially literature; and writing with maximum clarity, Johnson broadcasts good news, indeed. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 1573223077
• ISBN 13: 9781573223072
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256