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

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

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In his fourth book, Everything Bad Is Good for You, iconoclastic science writer Steven Johnson (who used himself as a test subject for the latest neurological technology in his last book, Mind Wide Open) takes on one of the most widely held preconceptions of the postmodern world--the belief that video games, television shows, and other forms of popular entertainment are detrimental to Americans' cognitive and moral development. Everything Good builds a case to the contrary that is engaging, thorough, and ultimately convincing. The heart of Johnson's argument is something called the Sleeper Curve--a universe of popular entertainment that trends, intellectually speaking, ever upward, so that today's pop-culture consumer has to do more "cognitive work"--making snap decisions and coming up with long-term strategies in role-playing video games, for example, or mastering new virtual environments on the Internet-- than ever before. Johnson makes a compelling case that even today's least nutritional TV junk foodthe Joe Millionaires and Survivors so commonly derided as evidence of America's cultural decline--is more complex and stimulating, in terms of plot complexity and the amount of external information viewers need to understand them, than the Love Boats and I Love Lucys that preceded it. When it comes to television, even (perhaps especially) crappy television, Johnson argues, "the content is less interesting than the cognitive work the show elicits from your mind." Johnson's work has been controversial, as befits a writer willing to challenge wisdom so conventional it has ossified into accepted truth. But even the most skeptical readers should be captivated by the intriguing questions Johnson raises, whether or not they choose to accept his answers.
--Erica C. Barnett From Publishers Weekly
Worried about how much time your children spend playing video games? Don't be, advises Johnsonnot 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 parentone 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. From School Library Journal Adult/High SchoolJohnson 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 gamesespecially the more violent onesare 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. From Scientific American
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 games 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 childs 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 childrens 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
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
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. From Bookmarks Magazine
Though the research behind Johnsons theories proves interesting, most critics found a few quirks in the construction of its delivery. Driven by a fervent desire to prove that todays 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 todays games and television shows help ones mind; and yet, in his defense, there doesnt 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. From Booklist
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 Time
Brisk, witty...and bolstered with research.... Indispensable. Wired
[Johnson] makes the reader feel smart by providing new tools with which to understand technology. Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
Most thoughtful, literate...drawing analogies from a prodigious range of fields...provocative. Boston Globe
Everything Bad is Good For You is a lucid tour of the pop-culture landscape....iconoclastic and captivating. Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker
Wonderfully entertaining...Johnson proposes that what is making us smarter is precisely what we thought was making us dumber: popular culture. New York Times Book Review, May 22, 2005
Johnson is a cool and neutral thinker, concerned with process rather than purpose... Seattle Weekly, May 11, 2005
In a fascinating...essay, Johnson compares today's pop-culture texts with those of the past and concludes they're getting more complex... Library Journal, April 15, 2005
Johnson...convincingly argues that...much contemporary popular culture is intellectually demanding, honing complex mental skills and encouraging well-reasoned decisions... Mother Jones, May/June 2005
Whether or not Everything Bad is correct, it is a brilliant speculation... About the Author
Steven Johnson's three previous books are the New York Times bestseller Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life; Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software; and Interface Culture: How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate. Cofounder of the online magazine FEED, Johnson currently writes the "Emerging Technology" column for Discover, is a contributing editor to Wired, writes regularly for Slate and The New York Times Magazine, and lectures widely.

Reviews:

Very good book, written from the perspective of a teenaged gamer made good. Johnson played games as a kid, baseball strategy games, as well as Dungeons and Dragons, and one can detect a certain bias in his outlook. However, his statistical references and footnotes make this book a scholarly look at popular culture - in particular movies, TV and videogames - and is a nice refutation of the "our culture is going into the toilet" crowd. Johnson argues - to me, convincingly - that even though modern mass market entertainment may appear "dumbed down", it really isn't, and that at a basic physical level, our brains are being made to work harder, get more exercise if you will, and develop higher cognitive functions as a result. A very complex book written in easy to read language with convincing data to back up the arguments - disguised in a very palatable dialogue that doesn't seem like science at all. He even takes Marshall McLuhan to task on at least one of his conclusions - very daring, and in this case, pays off. Johnson does miss out on one or two things - the ascendance of message boards is glossed over, or perhaps incorporated into "Internet" "email" and "IMs" in the discussion of why males watch about 1/5 as much TV as they did as little as five years ago. As a fellow who grew up playing Advanced Squad Leader (arguably a set of rules even more dense than AD&D), I could relate to his argument that kids will learn horribly complex procedures in the name of fun (as he did with his baseball games and D&D sets) and may very well be better for it. Overall, even if one disagrees with Johnson's arguments or conclusions, the book is fun to read; brings back memories for those who grew up in the 70s and 80s, presents logical arguments, well constructed, easy to understand, and supported by corroborating evidence - including scientific testimony about how the physical (hi Shannon) human brain works. Would love to read a rebuttal, though Johnson has personally sold me over hook, line and sinker. If nothing else, a comforting book amidst doom and gloom prophesies about the fate of our intellect in the hands of TV producers. Well done, Mr. Johnson.

Helpful apologia of current pop culture for people who quit paying attention after Asteroids and Cheers went away
Everything bad is good for you is not the right formulation. It's more like, Everything hard is good for you. TV series that are as complex as a 19th century Russian novel. Games so addictive that digital passkeys to them sell for serious money on ebay. This isn't the boob tube many of us grew up with, nor is it just another helping of "edginess". What's going on? Author Steven Johnson tells us, through some studies, that IQ has been going up over the past few generations, and the entertainment industry is starting to cater to this phenomenon. Cognitively, we or at least some of us are capable of keeping more balls in the air than in past eras. He cites some studies, demonstrating that we have smartened up enough so that the new media and genres have opened up cerebral vistas yet untapped. Or cerebral depths yet unreached. Or something. He says that, by forcing the brain to keep up with complex relationships on TV shows, or to juggle multiple possibilities in video games, new media is building cognitive muscle in our minds. Grappling with these puzzles transforms the mind that does the grappling. Okay, I buy that. I can see where it must take some grey matter to unravel these games. And late in the book he persuasively argues against the idea that the new media is turning everyone into amoral cipher-solvers. In other words, we're still us, only smarter and more engaged with more attention-demanding pastimes. I don't watch much TV and don't play video games anymore, and so I am often tempted to a feeling of virtuous superiority over those who do. (The section on the blogosphere is the only one I can directly appreciate, since I am an enthusiastic participant in the world of blogs.) So I am glad to have read this guide. It is an enlightening and nonthreatening tour into the ways that new media is rearranging the popular mind.

As a UK reader I may not have understood the references to certain US TV shows and the US baseball team cards the author played as a kid, but that did nothing to detract from being exposed to and developing many new thoughts and concepts by reading this book: 1. I now look in a new light at my children playing computer games as not the dumbing down exercise I simplistically believed to be the case. 2. The new format seen from 1980s onwards of multi-stranded structured TV series and reality TV, while in a medium I admit I do not watch a lot, provides an interesting approach, and the core lessons are universal in their application as I can think of much current UK TV that is not dissimilar 3. The impact of the internet as a social network and educational tool (rather than a tool used at work each day)and the wider beneficial IQ impact on middle and lower levels of society under all these changes shows a lot of what has happened in recent years has potentially wider ramifications that few futurist writers have easily communicated if understood. In 200 pages the book cannot cover everything but its beauty is the structure and interlocking arguments make for a very stimulating read - after a slow start - and the end notes on further reading on some of the key areas is very well done. Steven Johnson will hopefully follow up with a revisit at some future point of where things are going, since this book shows he has a great knack of generating arguments that are counter intuitive and thought provoking as a consequence.

Tantalizing thesis, light on evidence for causality
Steven Johnson's newest book, "Everything Bad Is Good For You" makes the controversial claim that popular culture engages us in a kind of mental calisthenics, resulting in the drastic changes in IQ distribution seen in the last 50 years. He describes beneficial effects of changes in popular culture - changes that have often been decried as hallmarks of societal demise - and shows how these new forms of media exploit our natural reward circuitry. Echoing Marshall McLuhan, Johnson says it's not so much the content (or 'message') of cultural media like Grand Theft Auto and The Sopranos, but the multi-threaded, interactive style of delivery (the 'medium') that engages us in a cognitive workout, and ultimately results in the drastic IQ increases of post-World War II America. Johnson begins his book with a vitriolic quote from George Will: "Ours is an age besotted with graphic entertainments. And in an increasingly infantilized society, whose moral philosophy is reducible to a celebration of 'choice,' adults are decreasingly distinguishable from children in their absorption in entertainments and the kinds of entertainments they are absorbed in - video games, computer games, hand-held games, movies on their computers and so on. This is progress: more sophisticated delivery of stupidity." This quote characterizes the dominant perspective on popular culture. But contrary to intuition, Johnson argues, today's most popular entertainment is enormously complex according to several different metrics, such as number of concurrent plot lines, the interdependence or 'nesting' of those plot lines, the Kolmogorov complexity of the networks relating the characters, and the kind of thinking required to make sense of all this complexity. And what's more, popular media has been trending towards increased complexity for the past half-century. The economics driving these developments relate to a shift from "least objectionable" programming into "most repeatable" programming, rewarding those games/movies/narratives that embrace ambiguity, those that require the entertained to take a more active and exploratory role in comprehension, and those that reward the inquisitively entertained with yet more ambiguity to resolve upon the next viewing. This neuroeconomic "device" is perfectly designed to hijack the pleasure system by establishing an expectation of reward. It is precisely this type of cognition which has been shown to modulate dopamine levels in the nucleus accumbens, providing the fix craved by pack-a-day smokers, ice-cream fanatics, and gambling addicts alike. And while the violence illustrated in games like Grand Theft Auto may seem to provide the cognitive nutrition equivalent to gambling, Johnson emphasizes (to use McLuhan's phrase) that the "medium is the message." It is not the content so much as the method of delivery that determines its most important effects: that of rewarding critical thinking and emphasizing interactivity, whether purely cognitive (as in complex narratives) or integrating motor skills as well (as in games). Whatever the detrimental effects of prime-time depravity might be, the positive effect of this new interactive media trend takes the form of "the Sleeper Curve": a 3-point increase in average IQ per year for each of the past 100 years. To put this change in perspective, consider this: a person placing in the 90th percentile of IQ in 1920 would place in the bottom third of a IQ test in 2000. "Everything Bad Is Good For You" is an incredibly provocative piece of cultural criticism, and while light on experimental evidence for causal relationships between IQ increases and changes in popular culture, it more than makes up for that shortcoming by illuminating ways in which this evidence might be attained. The book's best moments call to mind the optimism of the early 90s for engineering an interactive techno-topia, but these moments are thankfully tempered with a rigorously historical perspective and a firm grounding in relevant neuroscience. The book should be required reading for anyone with even a passing interest in communication theory, and is highly recommended for those with an interest in integrating neuroscientific principles with entertainment and education.

This guy is like Hemingway to me...,
...in that his entire book could have been more effectively and less painfully expressed in a short story or article. The author's basic argument is solid; our culture is growing more sophisticated, and as animals that have evolved to be curious and innovative, we find pleasure in stimulating and challenging pursuits. Media such as video games and tv programming have grown steadily more complex as our technology has permitted, and our culture has grown accustomed to, and comfortable with, new technologies. However, I agree with T. Baker-- it feels as if the author was "assigned" a 200 page paper on the topic, and is struggling to fill the entire book with a limited amount of material. Since there is little experimental evidence supporting the author's assertions, he relies heavily on a few preliminary reports, and fails to back any of his theories up with convincing evidence. The author has a great and logical argument, but it wasn't necessary to draw it out over so many chapters. Perhaps in a few more years there will be studies to warrant an entire book on this topic, but at this point the topic grows tedious a few chapters in.