Gather Everything Bad Is Good For You: How Popular Culture Is Making Us Smarter Written By Steven Johnson Expressed As Volume

book has a simple and counterintuitive message: playing video games makes you smarter,

Of course I'm going to like a book like this! If only I can somehow convince my wife that the hundreds of hours "wasted" on video games is actually time spent making me a better person.
Johnson's book argues that video games instill within players the skills required to think critically and analyze complex relationships.
For example, SimCity teaches players the delicate balance of taxes, industry, and government to create an urban utopia, rather than wasting the player's time.
While the media is often critical of games as the dumbing down of society, these games have rather improved society.


My only reservation with his argument is with games such as The Sims or Second Life.
While these games create rituals and culture, they do create a community that lacks, in the words of Sherry Turkle, real consequences.
A child can learn social skills and develop connections, but in the world of video games these connections are increasingly isolating.
Therefore, we need to be cautious that these communities do not withdraw us from the valuable relationships we need.
We're constantly being told that popular culture is just mindless entertainment but, as Steven Johnson shows in Everything Bad is Good for You, it's actually making us more intelligent.


Steven Johnson puts forward a radical alternative to the endless complaints about reality TV, throwaway movies and violent video games.
He shows that mass culture The Simpsons, Desperate Housewives, The Apprentice, The Sopranos, Grand Theft Auto is actually more sophisticated and challenging than ever before.


When we focus on what our minds have to do to process its complex, multilayered messages, it becomes clear that it's not dumbing us down but smartening us up.


'As witty as Seinfeld and as wise as ER'
  New Statesman

'Wonderfully entertaining'
  Malcolm Gladwell

'A vital, lucid exploration of the contemporary mediascape'
  Time Out

'A guru for Generation Xbox'
  Financial Times

'A mustread'
  Mark Thompson, former DirectorGeneral of the BBC

Steven Johnson is the bestselling author of Mind Wide Open, Where Good Ideas Come From, and Emergence: The Connected Lives Of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software, named as one of the best books ofby Esquire, The Village Voice, Amazon.
com, and Discover Magazine, and a finalist for the Helen Bernstein Award for Excellence in Journalism.
Before I read this book, I believed modern entertainment was progressively getting dumber, catering more and more to the lowest common denominator.
Now, I have been convinced otherwise, Even the worst dreck of modern TV is in many ways more complex and intellectually demanding than comparable programs from earlier times.


Does this mean books will soon go extinct, to be replaced by superior modern media

Mr.
Johnson writes, "No cultural form in history has rivaled the novels capacity to recreate the mental landscape of another consciousness, to project you into the first person experience of other human beings.
Movies and theater can make you feel as though youre part of the action, but the novel gives you an inner vista that is unparalleled: you are granted access not just to the events of another humans life, but to the precise way those events settle in his or her consciousness.
"

In this statement he sums up precisely what I love about fiction, Authors distill the best parts of their imagination and then translate that distillate into words, Impossibly, I inhabit and assimilate their imagined lives,

Other people have written about the benefits of literacy, social interaction, exercise, and sports.
Maybe I'm too fond of contrarianism, but I loved reading arguments for the benefits of junk entertainment.
Ironically, this was a difficult read, Not because the theme is hard to digest, or because Johnson's diction is criminally elevated neither of those are true, but because I couldn't really decide whether I believed him.


The crux of Johnson's argument relies on the increasing complexity with which our popular culture is deliberately built, a complexity which forces its audience to multitask, follow and understand multiple narrative threads, all the while developing advanced cognitive abilities and therefore becoming “smarter”.
He then goes on to describe the highlevel thinking required of modern video games, movies, television shows and the internet.


I agree with him on only one of four claims,

It's no secret that I love video games, so forgive the bias, Because of rapid technological advances, many of the newest video games play cinematically, feature engrossing characters, convoluted storylines and play right into Johnsons argument.
He frequently cites Grand Theft Auto and popular simulationbased games like Civilization and the cultural phenomenon The Sims as landmark games that challenge the intellect much more than PacMan.
In these cases, I agree, These multifaceted games are possible because of technological innovation, and required with these improvements are players who can handle tasks of greater difficulty.
As a footnote, it is a mystery why Johnson overlooked Myst, an inarguably difficult experience and once the alltime bestselling computer game as an example.


But when it comes to movies and television shows, I dont buy it, Although both mediums have benefited from technology and increased budgets, saying that newer movies are more complicated than older movies is a stretch and Johnson definitely cherrypicks his examples.
He compares “Bambi” to “Finding Nemo” as an example of this progression, citing that you have to follow the lives of twenty characters.
Even though its one of my alltime favorite movies, you can process the majority of “Finding Nemo” by following Marlin, Dory and Nemo.
He even cites the Lord of the Rings trilogy, which is based on books that were written sixty years ago.
To say that modern films are more complex today than they were in decades past is an obviously visual one, not one at all based on narrative technique.
But thats just me.

Finally, the most criminal case he makes is that of the internet, Like his modus operandi for the previous three arenas, Johnson picks only the true virtues of the internet to illustrate his point, and conveniently avoids the intellectual perils of Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, etc.
He also reassures us that though we are reading fewer books, we are “spending: much of our: day staring at words on a screen: browsing the Web, reading email, chatting with friends, posting a new entry tomillion blogs”.
Because nothing increases our intelligence like reading amateurish articles devoid of any proofreading, This is the kind of apologetic asscovering that plagues this book from start to finish,

In short, no, I dont think reality television promotes highlevel thinking, movies today are no less compelling and layered than they were forty years ago, and reading blogs over published works by reputable authors doesnt make you a smarter person.
Sure, you can make an argument for each of those if you pick and choose, but all in all, Im not sold.
This book is so poorly written that I don't know where to begin, By the end of the introduction, Steven Johnson has already told us that he doesn't care about morals, and apparently neither should we.
Well, I do. Knowledge with out serious thought about the implications of misuse of such knowledge is worse than ignorance.
I think that nuclear technology is amazing, but I don't think that we should make bombs out of it and use them.
Morals helps us to decide how to use technology, I think that a discussion of morals is very important to assessing any impact of technology on a society.


I would tend to think that the "increase" in the IQ of the general population has more to do with the fact that more of us are more educated.
My grandma dropped out of school in eighth grade, my grandpa wouldn't have been considered functionally literate.
A story like that is not as common as it use to be, More of the population can read, more of the population learns about history, more people learn about science.
We are more well educated, Also, I have a BS in physics, The physics that I was learning as an undergraduate is what people were writing PhD dissertations about and spent their whole lives studying in the early's.
So, one could argue that as an undergraduate in physics I knew more physics than did those making amazing discoveries at the beginning of theth century.
That is what an IQ type test would tell you, I don't think it has anything to do with video games and TV, I think it has to do with the increase in the breadth and depth of education in our society.


Don't read it, it is a waste of time, Find a good novel, there are a bunch on my list, curl up and feel like you haven't wasted time in your life.
Part: No shit Sherlock.
Part:

Moderately interesting, but too much rambling, Much of what I love about this book is its polemicising effect on readers that helps me to distinguish the culture snobs from the rest of us particularly helpful because culture snobs tend to be snobs not just culturally but also socially.
There isn't much new in Johnson's work that can't be found in Flynn's examination of the rise in IQ and various structuralist literary and cultural analyses, but it's nice to see the argument being made outside of sociology and cultural studies that the distinction between high and low culture is a socially constructed sham.
You don't need to be a Bourdieuvian to recognise the way cultural choices are made by individuals as a way of distinguishing themselves from their peers rather than on the basis of intrinsic merits, and indeed, Johnson isn't anything close to a Bourdieuvian, but he does provide a mainstream version I say that deliberately, rather than 'dumbed down' of an argument that is well supported in the academic literature.
Somewhere betweenandstars. Obviously at this point, this book is quite outdated part of the issue with my promise to read books on the first couple of pages of my "to read" list.
The central premise is that media has become more complex be it the thought process necessary to beat a video game or character/plot depth knowledge necessary to "get" a show and as a result, our cognitive processes are improving and we are becoming smarter.
The problem is there is not much causal research in the book to back this up which Johnson touches on very briefly in the afterward and increases in IQ or cognitive development could be attributed to so many other things.
So, do I believe media has gotten more complex Absolutely, You don't need to look further than the fan analyses of Breaking Bad episodes or Netflix original programming or any number of other sources to see that, IMO a bummer these things didn't exist when the book was written!.
Are we smarter because of it I mean, maybe It's possible, If you're interested in culture and media studies, you will likely enjoy this book more than if you are say, a statistician or researcher.
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