I just finished Everything Bad Is Good for You and was impressed
The tile of Steven Berlin Johnson’s recent book - Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter - gives you a pretty good idea of what his argument is. I don’t want to re-cap his whole book - it’s a short and easy read in any case, and more nuanced and interesting than a synopsis would suggest. However if you haven’t read the reviews he suggests that while the content of TV shows and video games may disappoint, the increasing complexity of multi-stranded TV programming and the puzzle-solving that takes place in the better kind of video games are giving our brains a work-out and making us better at solving those problems. He also suggests that reality TV helps us to develop better “social intelligence” while watching it because it encourages us to analyse the relationships between participants (although those relationships tend to be cartoonishly exaggerated and manipulated).
I didn’t have great expectations of the book - I feared given its bestseller status it might be merely “pop science” posturing - but having read it (in part because I will be contributing to the Sage Encyclopedia of Children, Adolescents, and the Media) I do think the author raises some interesting points that haven’t been examined in earlier research - particularly when he talks about the increasing complexity of (at least some) television drama. That said, he is clearly and explicitly writing a polemic, so he does, I feel, underplay the importance (and potential impact) of the content of media. This was brought home to me in a passage early in the book (pp. 31-32) where he discusses playing SimCity with his nephew.
He was picking up the game’s inner logic nonetheless. After about an hour of tinkering, I was concentrating on trying to revive one particularly run-down manufacturing district. As I contemplated my options, my nephew piped up, “I think we need to lower our industrial tax rates.” He said it as naturally and as confidently as he might have said, “I think we need to shoot the bad guy.”… My nephew would be asleep in five seconds if you popped him down in an urban studies classroom, but somehow an hour of playing SimCity taught him that high tax rates in industrial areas can stifle development.
What that made me think of immediately is not “how impressive that a kid is thinking about urban development” but “how sinister that a video game can embed a particular (laissez faire capitalist) world view and pass it on to a kid who (because of the out of classroom context) may be more inclined to accept it without questioning its assumptions.
So I wouldn’t take the book as the last word in the long-running debates around media effects - but it is an interesting and useful contribution nonetheless. I would be interested if anyone could point me to discussions among media effects scholars about this book to see whether its suggestions are in fact old hat in the academic community.
For more of his arguments you can read selected pages via the Amazon link above or read an excerpt from the New York Times Magazine. The author has done the obligatory book promotion blitz so you can also hear him on Morning Edition. His work has also been the talk of the blogosphere (bloglines search) (technorati search). This may in part be thanks to his status as an Internet pioneer and friend to A-list bloggers like Cory but I suspect some of the favourable reception it has received online is because he is clearly One Of Us - a video game player, board game geek and fan of TV shows like Lost, 24 and The Sopranos. He starts his book with a description of his childhood love for APBA games - ‘fantasy baseball’ games played with dice and cards. Right away I was charmed….