Everything Bad is Good For You

I don't remember the exact circumstances of how I first came across this book, but the cultural web magazine Slate played an important role. The underlying premise of this book by Steven Johnson is that major elements of pop culture which routinely get ragged on like hyper violent video games and sex saturated and morally ambiguous television series are actually good for the public in that they challenge us and increase problem solving skills and social networking abilities. Anyway, Johnson writes or did write for Slate and someother contributor called him on this last year, posting a refutation of the points he made. Well, someone decided that it'd be great to have a more formal debate between the two, and they traded some e-mails which were later posted on the website. Let me point out that this event alone excites me, that two people could openly and reasonably debate each other without resorting to sneaky tactics, ultimately allowing the readers decide the better of the positions.

Enough of what isn't my opinion. I do suggest that people read this book if only for the ideas it proposes. They're outside mainstream thought and are well supported. Personally, I didn't find it worth buying, but it's certainly worth a trip to the library or a generous friend's house. Johnson divides his book into two parts, the first examining how elements of pop culture including video games, television, movies, and emerging technologies are benefiting the masses while the second investigates the first part's contribution to the Flynn Effect, the finding that the IQ of the regular person has increased over time, and why this has all occurred.

After finishing Everything Bad is Good for You, I find myself agreeing with the benefits Johnson finds in video games. He finds great benefit in the processes (which is where he finds the greatest contributions to our minds from pop culture rather than content) of learning the rules of virtual worlds and needing to utilize the skills of probing (a form of the scientific method) and telescoping (a method of finding order). One thing that confuses me about this chapter is his ideas on why we play video games. He suggests we play because the rewards are clear and immediate. We can beat a boss and get satisfaction from that in Mario, but life is much more difficult, ambiguity ruling our actions and their consequences. Does Johnson suggest this is a good thing or merely offer it as an explanation? I can't remember. I guess I could check, but I'll instead use this as a hook for you to check out the book. Find your own bleeding answers! Or I'm just lazy. Find your own answer to that too!

On to the television chapter. My respect for Johnson is at its highest here as he gives a fair presentation of his beliefs, comparing like shows (Hill Street Blues to West Wing and Starsky and Hutch to Survivor, the highbrow to the highbrow and the lowbrow to the lowbrow). Still, this is where I raise the greatest objections. Again, Johnson places great importance on the processes involved in this entertainment, focusing here on the complexity of the characters and plot. He claims that we as an audience are forced to work harder to understand what's going on in series like 24 and West Wing as references are made to things never shown on screen and passing references have integral importance to some of the plot lines. From this point, Johnson asserts he learn to better understand social networks in our daily lives. I'm not ready to fully contest the truth of learning to learn about social networks from television series, but I would like to say that it's limited. The shows necessarily limit our knowledge of these characters. We only see them for brief moments in certain circumstances. It seems like the rejection of those same ideas he presented in just the previous chapter where our unparalleled ability to interact with the environment was a huge positive benefit. How much can we really learn about these characters if we can't test them? On a side note, I found the little tables he made of plot difficulty to be unintentionally hilarious.

What gets me bad is that Johnson never suggests watching the news over these more entertaining shows. What about the complexity of unscripted real life? What about seeing how declarations by the United Nations lead to other events? I fully admit that there are problems with the mass media, but a half-hour of checking out the latest news online kicks the tail of watching forty-five minutes of ER and another fifteen minutes of commercials.

I'm not going to spend much time on the two chapters on movies and emerging technologies seeing as how movies is largely a rehash of the television chapter except for identifying the limits of movies and the latter chapter is a lot like the second take of the video games chapter only our interaction with technology is not as much for entertainment as games. I will point out, however, that I think Johnson cheats when discussing the Lord of the Rings movies and his reasons for it being so massively successful. It is belief that this trilogy is so popular because it resembles a television series in its length and complex cast of characters. He goes on to make a list of the characters. First of all, if I remember correctly, he includes Gil-Galad, a character who doesn't appear in the cut movies, and these characters are much more simple than those he celebrated in The Sopranos and 24. They're either good or evil. It's pretty clear cut except for the notable exception of Gollum.

Here are the two websites I alluded to earlier. The first is a Slate writer's critical look at Johnson's work while the second is their dialogue.
http://www.slate.com/id/2117395/
http://www.slate.com/id/2118550/