Everything Bad is Good for You

Book #12 (whoop! whoop!) was Steven Johnson's Everything Bad is Good For You, How Today's Popular Culture is Actually Making us Smarter. It was a fascinating book, all in all. Mr. Johnson's thesis is,

"...The popular media steadily, but almost imperceptible, [is] making our minds sharper, as we soak in entertainment usually dismissed as so much lowbrow fluff. I call this upward trend the Sleeper Curve, after the classic sequence from Woody Allen's mock sci-fi film, where a team of scientists from 2173 are astounded that twentieth century society failed to grasp the nutritional merits of cream pies and hot fudge."

Popular entertainment is getting more and more complicated - whether that's because we play more games where the objective is to explore a simulated world solving riddles to figure out the objective of the game, or whether that is because we are now watching television shows with hundreds of sub plots which persist from show to show and sometimes only resolve over multiple seasons, the kind of culture we are consuming is making us steadily smarter, raising our IQs, and enhancing our problem solving skills.

This book is a semi-amazing read. I don't know that I think Mr. Johnson's evidence is all that compelling, it's more that he presents data that you already have in an intriguing new light. I'm well aware that the Simpsons is a more intricate show than Leave it to Beaver, but what I had never considered was that this complexity was actually feeding my brain.

Mr. Johnson is a bit pedantic in his arguments - repeating the same data over and over and over - but I'm willing to forgive that in this case because I think his thesis represents such radical change in such commonly held beliefs. I'm also not entirely bought into his thesis -because the data he uses over and over and over is a bit on the shallow side (he assumes you know the SIMs and will just take him at face value that it is "complex") - but I think the solid data he does present (like thelongitudinal study on the overall raising of IQ scores in the last 80 years) is surprisingly compelling.

Speaking as someone who has commonly argued that there is nothing different about a particular generation, it is just their tools which define them, this was definitely a major "about face" book for me. After reading it, it seems likely that the popular culture you are weaned on has at least some affect on how you think - even if it is not quite as dramatic as I think Mr Johnson presents it.

Definitely worth reading... It'll make you think. Besides, you're already being forced to think super hard just to follow the Sopranos and The Apprentice, why not do some leisure thinking...