Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter by Steven Johnson (PDF)

Description

From the New York Times bestselling author of How We Got To Now and FarsightedForget everything you’ve ever read about the age of dumbed-down, instant-gratification culture. In this provocative, unfailingly intelligent, thoroughly researched, and surprisingly convincing big idea book, Steven Johnson draws from fields as diverse as neuroscience, economics, and media theory to argue that the pop culture we soak in every day—from Lord of the Rings to Grand Theft Auto to The Simpsons—has been growing more sophisticated with each passing year, and, far from rotting our brains, is actually posing new cognitive challenges that are actually making our minds measurably sharper. After reading Everything Bad is Good for You, you will never regard the glow of the video game or television screen the same way again.With a new afterword by the author.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review “Revelatory…Daring…Finally, an intellectual who doesn’t think we’re headed down the toilet!” –Washington Post Book World”Persuasive…The old dogs won’t be able to rest as easily once they’ve read Everything Bad is Good for You, Steven Johnson’s elegant polemic…. It’s almost impossible not to agree with him.”—Walter Kirn, The New York Times Book Review”A thought-provoking argument that today’s allegedly vacuous media are, well, thought provoking…A brisk, witty read, well versed in the history of literature and bolstered with research…Johnson, it turns out, still knows the value of reading a book. And this one is indispensable.” —Time”There is a pleasing eclecticism to [Johnson’s] thinking. He is as happy analyzing Finding Nemo as he is dissecting the intricacies of a piece of software … Johnson wants to understand popular culture…in the very practical sense of wondering what watching something like The Dukes of Hazzard does to the way our minds work.” —Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker”The author Newsweek called one of the most influential people in cyberspace…is back. The beauty of Johnson’s latest work — beyond its engaging, accessible prose — is that anyone with even a glancing familiarity with pop culture will come to the book ready to challenge his premise. Everything Bad Is Good for You anticipates and refutes nearly every likely claim, building a convincing case that media have become more complex and thus make our minds work harder.” —Cleveland Plain Dealer”Through a string of airtight, academic and very entertaining essays, Johnson maintains that prime-time TV is more intellectually engaging than ever.” —Time Out New York”Sophisticated…nimble…strangely satisfying.” —Newsday”Johnson’s challenge to the oft-repeated lament that mass culture is dumbing down is as enlightening as it is necessary.” –BookForum”Johnson may be the first mainstream writer to bring neuroscientific inquiry to ‘The Apprentice’…It’s scientific and literary rigor, couch-potato style.” –Chicago Tribune”Johnson paints a convincing and literate portrait, and he shows himself to be a master of many disciplines, which deepens the well of his credibility.” –San Francisco Chronicle”Engaging…Intriguing…Breezy and funny… Johnson is a forceful writer, and he makes a good case; his book is an elegant work of argumentation.” —Salon.com About the Author Steven Johnson is the bestselling author of eleven books, including Where Good Ideas Come From, Wonderland, and The Ghost Map. He’s the host and co-creator of the Emmy-winning PBS/BBC series How We Got To Now, and the host of the podcast American Innovations. He lives in Brooklyn and Marin County, California with his wife and three sons. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. It is a truth nearly universally acknowledged that pop culture caters to our base instincts; mass society dumbs down and simplifies; it races to the bottom. The rare flowerings of “quality programming” only serve to remind us of the overall downward slide. But no mater how many times this refrain is belted out, it doesn’t get any more accurate. As we’ve seen, precisely the opposite seems to be happening: the secular trend is toward greater cognitive demands, more depth, more participation. If you accept that premise, you’re forced then to answer the question: Why?For decades, the race to the bottom served as kind of a Third Law of Thermodynamics for mass society: all other things being equal, pop culture will decline into simpler forms. But if entropy turns out not to govern the world of mass society – if our entertainment is getting smarter after all – we need a new model to explain the trend. That model is a complex, layered one. The forces driving the Sleeper Curve straddle three different realms of experience: the economic, the technological, and the neurological. Part of the Sleeper Curve reflects changes in the market forces that shape popular entertainment; part emanates from long-term technological trends; and part stems from deep-seated appetites in the human brain.The Sleeper Curve is partly powered by the force of repetition. Over the past 20 years, a fundamental shift has transformed the economics of popular entertainment: original runs are now less lucrative than repeats. In the old days of television and Hollywood, the payday came from your initial airing on network or your first run at the box office. The aftermarkets for content were marginal at best. But the mass adoption of the VCR, and cable television’s hunger for syndicated programming, has turned that equation on its head. In 2003, for the first time, Hollywood made more money from DVD sales that it did from box-office receipts. Television shows repurposed as DVDs generated more than a billion dollars in sales during the same period. And the financial rewards of syndication are astronomical: shows like The Simpsons and The West Wing did well for their creators in their initial airings on network television, but the real bonanza came from their afterlife as reruns.How do the economics of repetition connect to the Sleeper Curve? The virtue of syndication or DVD sales doesn’t lie in the financial reward itself, but in the selection criteria that the reward creates in the larger entertainment ecosystem. If the ultimate goal stops being about capturing an audience’s attention once, and becomes more about keeping their attention through repeat viewings, that shift is bound to have an effect on the content. Television syndication means pretty much one thing: the average fan might easily see a given episode five or 10 times, instead of the one or two viewings that you would have expected in the Big Three era. Shows that prosper in syndication do so because they can sustain five viewings without becoming tedious. And sustaining five viewings means adding complexity, not subtracting it. Reruns are generally associated with the dumbing down of popular culture, when, in fact, they’re responsible for making the culture smarter.To appreciate the magnitude of the shift, you need only rewind the tape to the late seventies and contemplate the governing principle that reigned over prime-time programming in the dark ages of Joanie Loves Chachi — a philosophy dubbed the theory of “Least Objectionable Programming” by NBC executive Paul Klein. LOP is a pure-breed race-to-the-bottom model: you create shows designed on the scale of minutes and seconds, with the fear that the slightest challenge — “thought,” say, or “education” — will send the audience scurrying to the other networks.Contrast LOP with the model followed by The Sopranos —é what you might call the Most Repeatable Programming model. MRP shows are designed on the scale of years, not seconds. The most successful programs in the MRP model are the ones you still want to watch three years after they originally aired, even though you’ve already seen them three times. The MRP model cultivates nuance and depth; it welcomes “tricks” like backward episodes and dense allusions to Hollywood movies.The transformation of video games — from arcade titles designed for a burst of action in a clamorous environment, to contemplative products that reward patience and intense study — provides the most dramatic case study in the power of repetition. The titles that lie at the top of the all-time game bestseller lists are almost exclusively games that can literally be played forever without growing stale: games like Age of Empires, The Sims, or Grand Theft Auto that have no fixed narrative path, and thus reward repeat play with an ever-changing complexity; sports simulations that allow you to replay entire seasons with new team rosters, or create imaginary leagues from different eras. Titles with definitive endings have less value in the gaming economy; the more open-ended and repeatable, the more likely it is the game that will be a breakout hit.Technological innovation, of course, has contributed mightily to the Sleeper Curve. To begin with, most of the media technologies introduced over the past 30 years have been, in effect, repetition engines: tools designed to let you rewind, replay, repeat. It seems amazing to think of it now, but just 30 years ago, television viewers tuning in for All in the Family or M*A*S*H had almost no recourse available to them if they wanted to watch a scene again, or catch a bit of dialogue they missed. If you wanted to watch the “Chuckles the Clown” episode of Mary Tyler Moore again, you had to wait six months, until CBS reran it during the summer doldrums — and then five years before it started cycling in syndication.Since those days, the options for slowing down or reversing time have proliferated: first the VCR; then the explosion of cable channels, running dozens of shows in syndication at any given moment; then DVDs 15 years later; then TiVo; and now “on demand” cable channels that allow viewers to select programs directly from a menu of options — as well as pause and rewind them. Viewers now curate their own private collections of classic shows, their DVD cases lining living-room shelves like so many triple-decker novels. The supplementary information often packaged with these DVDs adds to their repetition potential.These proliferating new recording technologies are often described as technologies of convenience, but the technology has another laudable side effect: it facilitates close readings. As technologies of repetition allowed new levels of complexity to flourish, the rise of the Internet gave that complexity a new venue where it can be dissected, critiqued, rehashed, and explained. Even a modestly popular show — like HBO’s critically acclaimed drama Six Feet Under — has spawned hundreds of fan sites and discussion forums, where each episode is scrutinized and annotated with an intensity usually reserved for Talmudic scholars. The fan sites create a public display of passion for the show, which nervous Hollywood execs sometimes use to justify renewing a show that might otherwise be cancelled due to mediocre ratings. Shows like Arrested Development and Alias survive for multiple seasons thanks in part to the enthusiasm of their smaller audiences — not to mention the fans’ willingness to buy DVD versions en masse when they’re eventually released.The new possibilities for meta-commentary are best displayed in game walk-throughs: those fantastically detailed descriptions that “walk” the reader “through” the environment of a video game, usually outlining the most effective strategies for completing the game’s primary objectives. Hundreds of these documents exist online, almost all of them created by ordinary players, assembling tips and techniques from friends and game discussion boards. If you have your doubts about the spatio-logical complexity of today’s video games and don’t have the time to sit down and play one yourself, I recommend downloading one of these walk-throughs from the Web and scrolling through it just to gauge the scale and intricacy of these gameworlds.Pop culture’s race to the top over the past decades forces us to rethink our assumptions about the base tendencies of mass society. Almost every Chicken Little story about the declining standards of pop culture contains a buried blame-the-victim message: Junk culture thrives because people are naturally drawn to simple, childish pleasures. Children zone out in front of their TV shows or their video games because the mind seeks out mindlessness. This is the Slacker theory of brain function: the human brain desires above all else that the external world refrain from making it do too much work. Given their druthers, our brains would prefer to luxuriate among idle fantasies and mild amusements. And so, never being one to refuse a base appetite, the culture industry obliges. The result is a society where maturity, in Andrew Solomon’s words, is a “process of mental atrophy.”Think about it this way: if our brain really desired to atrophy in front of mindless entertainment, then the story of the last 30 years of video games — from Pong to The Sims — would be the story of games that grew increasingly simple over time. You’d never need a guidebook or a walk-through; you’d just fly through the world, a demigod untroubled by challenge and complexity. Game designers would furiously compete to come out with the simplest titles; every virtual space would usher you to the path of least resistance. Of course, exactly the opposite has occurred. The games have gotten more challenging at an astonishing rate: from PacMan’s single page of patterns to Grand Theft Auto III’s 53,000-word walk-through in a mere two decades. The games are growing more challenging because there’s an economic incentive to make them more challenging — and that economic incentive exists because our brains like to be challenged. Read more

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐This book has a great concept behind it: the idea that all our modern pop culture isn’t destroying our minds, but rather making us smarter and teaching us problem solving and social skills.I found it to be pretty good, although not fantastic. The early parts in which Johnson describes his childhood experiences with baseball games and D&D closely mirrored my own, and I found myself pleasantly reminiscing about those days. I had no real disagreements with any of the arguments he put forth, and overall this book was a well-written and fun read.However, I was a little disappointed by the depth of it. Johnson goes through modern video gaming and reality TV, and although it’s all interesting stuff, I started to feel that he spent a lot of his time repeating myself. That is, he gave examples of the same ideas over and over. While all the examples were effective, it became a tad redundant, and by the end, I was wishing that the book was just denser and deeper, a heavier exploration. Of course, with this subject matter, perhaps it is self-limiting with regards to depth.It is a good book, but there’s just not enough to it to be totally satisfying. This would’ve probably been better a large essay in a compilation of futurist and modern thought papers. Still, it is a worthwhile read.

⭐This is a provocative book which warrants serious consideration. The author postulates that through the device of the sleeper curve, the various technological developments which pervade popular culture are not dumbing down America, but rather leading to development of a broader range of skills than credited by academic experts.He sets out his view in sections devoted to video games, film, and very briefly, the internet, and explores the differing skills which are exercised during their consumption.As someone who has exhibited a preference for aspects of popular culture as opposed to high culture for most of my life, the argument is very attractive at the outset. As one delves deeper into the subject serious questions arise as to whether there is a general case to answer.Consider video games, where our author testifies to the skills required to play some of the more complex games such as Grand Theft Auto. There is a strong case to be made here but the issue is rather deflated when one considers that the vast majority of game players consume sports and other games which are considerably less complex and demanding.Film also has a substantial longevity in the popular pantheon of leisure activities. It manages to portray a story and certain sophisticated complexities but still lacks by far the great leap forward that one achieves through reading a novel.I would reject a notion that the use of the internet provides much of an intellectual challenge, given the degree to which internet consumers access porn sites and where much of the content is clearly aimed at the lower end of the spectrumHaving said all of this, I believe that there is something in the authors argument, but in a more narrow sense. For myself I consider that there are a minority of people within our society who exhibit skill and knowledge improvements as a result of immersion in the complexities and sophistications of certain games, or movies or whatever. The question of whether they are smarter is debatable. I would suggest that the elite to whom I refer demonstrate aptitudes of learning from external stimuli whichare far greater that those of the general populace. This tends to suggest to me however, that those aptitudes are inherited and/or learnt from an environment and upbringing where parents encourage skills of learning and exploring, encouragement and direction etc.All in all, a worthwhile book subject to some of the caveats which I have alluded to above.

⭐The writer’s style feels like a a conversation, where he tells about his ideas and some supportive research made by other persons. The lack of references in the text is compensated by a last chapter with comments about hte origin of the data he used to support his claims.This informal text is what makes the book an easy and enjoyable reading. However, as a scientific result, the book is not completely sound, since his conclusions are based only on what he think is happening and the supportive that is not necessarily correlated with his findings.Parents, researchers and educators will find the book provocative. Actually, it defends that beyond content, form is also important, and maybe more important when we are talking about the new media (basically TV and games).As a general reader, it is a very good book. As a position book, it really makes the author’s point of view. However, scientific oriented readers will feel something is missing.

⭐This books starts out on rather slippery footing, but gains a foothold in the subject quickly. Quite a bit of time is spent on the topics of modern television and video games, but that is perhaps because those two things occupy so much of our daily lives nowadays.Johnson raises several salient points. I’m not yet sure how much of it I agree with, as some of the generalizations don’t fit in my own household. But all in all, an interesting read, and doesn’t take very long to get through.If you’re looking for some arguments to get your mom to stop picking on you for playing so much X-Box, this book is for you.

⭐Johnson is spot on about computer and video games and how they are fundamentally changing the way an entire generation thinks, learns, works, shares, etc. and raising IQ scores and cognitive abilities in the bargain. But he should have left well enough alone by sticking with exploring the gaming phenomenon. Instead, he throws gaming in the same grab bag as other “entertainment,” notably television. Once he wrote about The Sopranos and inane shows like Survivor and The Apprentice in the same sentence, he lost me. “Reality television provides the ultimate testimony to the cultural dominance of games in this moment of pop culture history…” Give me a break. This is yet another example of a potentially great full-length magazine article that never should have been turned into a book. A well-edited 5,000 words max would have covered it all.

⭐came early and threw in freebies! really nice and recommend this seller.

⭐Fantastic book which presents a whole new way of looking at modern day media. I didn’t even realize that such a unique perspective would have existed. I’ve read FAR too many books and articles that all cry about the modern day trash that is television, video games and franchise movies, so it was a genuine pleasure to see a book analyzing the evolution and growing complexities of these mediums. The observations, analysis and evidence were soundly compelling and persuasive… and the writing itself was smooth, engaging and interesting. This book should be put on the list for ‘recommended reading’ for all Media and Communications university students.

⭐I remain unconvinced by the central tenet of his argument. He seems to ignore the vast swathe of largely mindless pap which fills the airways and focuses on a narrow band of high quality drama and comedy. Would he really argue that modern TV documentary series are better than the likes of Jacob Bronowski’s “Ascent of Man” or Alistair Cooke’s “America” Interesting idea but unsupported by evidence as far as I can see.

⭐Great idea of a book to look at new media from a different perspective, although I found it quite repetitive.Could have been much more concise, I found myself scanning and skipping.

⭐Arrived in good time and the book is great!

⭐Fabulous

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