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Everything Bad is Good for You
Posted by
samzenpus
on Fri Oct 28, 2005 02:27 PM
from the dogs-and-cats-living-together dept.
from the dogs-and-cats-living-together dept.
clampe writes "
In Everything Bad Is Good For You: How Today's Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter, Steven Johnson tries to convince the reader that video games, television and the Internet are good for us, despite critics who talk about "vast Wastelands" and "infantilized societies". The book raises interesting questions, but in the end is a lightweight analysis that is better for engendering sound bites on NPR and The Daily Show than for convincing serious readers." Read on for Clampes' review.
In "Everything Bad Is Good For You" Johnson argues that major forms of entertainment like television, video games, films and the Internet have grown increasingly complex over the past several decades, which corresponds to an increase in average IQ scores in the U.S.
The introduction to the book summarizes cultural criticisms about the growing banality of entertainment, focusing mostly on television. Johnson uses this springboard to state his thesis: that popular culture is not only growing more complex, but that the complexity is making consumers of pop culture more intelligent.
The main content of the book is divided into two main parts, with the first arguing that video games, television, the Internet and movies have grown more complex in recent years, and the second part outlining the relationship between those forms of entertainment and increased intelligence.
Johnson claims that the complexity of problem solving and exploration involved in current video games help players learn critical thinking skills. He amusingly asks the readers to consider a world where video games have been around for centuries and a new technology called the book is all the rage. The cultural critics currently bagging on video games would claim books are static, isolating and understimulating. Johnson is the first to admit he's usng hyperbole here, and books obviously have value, but the point is made. Video games, he points out, cannot be directly compared to books in terms of the types of intelligence they encourage. Video games, according to Johnson, are valuable because they force players to make choices, solve problems, keep track of varied situations and in some cases cooperate with others.
Criticizing television is a popular straw man activity for cultural critics. The boob-tube, the idiot box, the vast wasteland. Johnson argues that while the general thinking is TV has gotten worse over the past 30 years, it in fact has become much better. Current shows have more complex narratives, trust viewers to catch subtle references and have denser social networks. Johnson compares "Dragnet" to "Starsky and Hutch" to "Hill Street Blues" to "The Sopranos" to show the evolving complexity of narratives in television dramas. Even reality TV, the easiest target around, is more complex compared to it's historical antecedent, the game show.
The Internet is valuable in three ways according to Johnson: by virtue of being participatory, by forcing users to learn new interfaces and by creating new channels for social interaction. Johnson provides a laundry list of online interactions that bring people together and make them smarter.
Johnson gives a "qualified yes" to the proposition that movies have undergone the same transformation as television. His main evidence is the increase in the number of characters to be found in "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy compared to the original "Star Wars" trilogy. The other main evidence is the development of a sub-genre of films he calls "mind-benders" typified by Kaufman works like "Being John Malkovich".
In Part 2 of the book, Johnson associates research that shows American IQ scores have risen over the past several decades (the Flynn Effect) with the increased complexity of popular culture. He looks at alternative explanations for this trend, such as nutrition and education, dismissing each in favor of the popular culture explanation.
The Good:
There is something about people who say they never watch TV that makes me want to punch them. I'm also a little tired of having to explain at dinner parties and family gatherings that my playing video games does not mean I went ahead with the lobotomy. Johnson seems to have tapped into a real feeling that television and games are not the worthless pastimes that popular media decries them as. The book raises interesting and important questions, while providing a tonic against cultural nay-sayers.
As in previous works like Emergence, Johnson has an engaging and approachable writing style. He blends personal experience and decent explanations of the literature to craft his arguments in an engaging manner.
The Bad:
The main problem with this book is the strength of the claims made in Part 2. Human intelligence is a complex mechanism affected by a blend of genetic and environmental factors. It is possible that games and television play a role in positively affecting intelligence, but Johnson has not strongly made that case here. The data he presents, while intriguing, are correlational at best and arbitrary at worst. Johnson is actually careful to qualify the populations he considers to be affected by popular culture, and the kinds of intelligence he is talking about. However, the arguments still hang together on fragile strings of "It could be" and "it's not like because of this".
For example, it could be that his selection of television shows to compare biases his analysis. What Johnson says about the increased complexity of television narratives seems intuitively true, but there's danger in the kind of analysis where shows are plucked with no clear selection mechanism from the past and we draw such sweeping conclusions from them.
There are also several alternative explanations to the trends pointed out in this book. For example, let's assume that there is more worthwhile television than there used to be. However, the real comparison should be between worthwhile television compared over the total amount of television available. Given the explosion of television programming since Starsky and Hutch, it's not surprising that better shows are available. Another explanation might be the maturation of the media. Literature is the gold standard here to some extent, but the novel is an older media form that has had many opportunities to attract good authors than television and video games. Over the centuries that we've had novels, we accumulated some talented authors, and those luminaries attract other talented individuals. Television and video games are a newer media, and consequently haven't accumulated as many giants. Some of Johnson's examples of the new complexity in television and film are really examples of a couple of special individuals, like Aaron Sorkin and Charlie Kaufman, attracted to an increasingly mature art form.
The above counter-examples show some of the dangers of this case based argumentation at the center of this book. By using pseudo-case studies, there isn't really a basis by which the data presented by Johnson is stronger than "because I said so." Work that would help his argument has been done in communication studies, developmental psychology and cognitive psychology, but those fields are largely ignored here. Instead, cranky old guys like Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman are set up as straw men. This disconnect reminds of how well Howard Rheingold incorporates current research into popular press efforts like this book. Johnson does use some decent resources like James Paul Gee, and seems to be widely read in several cogent fields, but it doesn't seem reflected as well as might be expected in the actual text.
The sections on the Internet and movies are clumsy and seem almost to be afterthoughts to the other sections. The section on video games is stronger, and the book would have been better by concentrating on that element of the story alone. May not have had as cool a title though.
Final recommendation:
This book is fun, light reading. It's not bad as a catalyst for discussion at parties, but as a serious polemic argument it doesn't hold up. Still, the book is a good airplane read, or something for the hammock. But you're better off playing a video game."
You can purchase Everything Bad Is Good For You: How Today's Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
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Wait a second... (Score:4, Informative)
http://slate.msn.com/id/2085668/ [msn.com]
His argument (and I use that term advisedly) was that when you use Google, really stupid searches (like for "flowers" alone or "steven" alone) get bad results, so good searches must be getting bad results too. To see how badly he got roasted on that article, you can go into their "fray"
http://fray.slate.msn.com/?id=3936&tp=webhead&nav
and do a search for articles before 07/17/03 (the day after the article was put on the web) to see the comments of the people around that time. (I'd link the search, but it doesn't seem to let me.)
Now, I know Johnson had a point, and after tons of criticism he eventually put one together, but that hastily thrown-together-argument should have been in the article the first time around. You can see his pitiful attempts to defend this earlier article here, which is the list of his posts on the Fray:
http://fray.slate.msn.com/?id=3936&tp=webhead&act
Re:Wait a second... (Score:3, Insightful)
Hell, if you come to me and say "Apple" - how the hell will I know what the context is? I cannot have a meaningful conversation with you without first establishing the context especially since the word is ambiguo
Define "intelligent". (Score:4, Insightful)
Take this to a political forum and you'll see what I mean. The "intelligent posts" usually are the ones you agree with while the uninformed idiots are usually the ones you disagree with.
But that's just human nature.
Personally, I know people who love playing video games who have trouble with basic troubleshooting on that same computer.
If such were the case, wouldn't we see more baseball players with advanced math or physics degrees because they have experience with velocity and curves and such?
Parent
Re:Wait a second... (Score:3, Interesting)
That comes as no surprise to you, of course, and you (the intelligent Slashdotter) would have no trouble finding out what you wanted to know by giving Google just a bit of context. The only people asking about "flowers" in the most general sense are third-graders wri
Quick, please help (Score:5, Funny)
pls send synopsis, gmail in profile
or IM
k thx
no time to login
Re:Quick, please help (Score:3, Funny)
But seriously folks...
This "review" reminds me of the record reviews in small campus newspapers of podunk-town colleges.
Gosh. Thanks for that crucia
for a good defense of popular (mass) culture... (Score:5, Informative)
(no referral code in amazon.com link, i promise)
Shiny! (Score:3, Funny)
Gotta run... I'm analyzing the 'subtle narrative' of a rubber ball.
San Andreas..... (Score:4, Funny)
People crapped on pool halls when they first came out. Fact is- they kept kids out of trouble. When there was no TV- kids collected comic books. There is always going to be distractions-- they are just growing to be more complicated.
Re:San Andreas..... (Score:4, Insightful)
As violent games have become commonplace, violent crime rates have declined dramatically. Since GTA3 came out, women have made more strides toward pay equity, more positions of power, and there's been a decline in both domestic violence and rape.
All the evidence I've seen indicates that most people are, in fact, able to distinguish games from reality and there may even be a net benefit to society from "dangerous, immoral" games (acting out impulses in fantasies/games may make one less likely to act them out in reality).
And the parent's statement that "Beating up bitches and killing cops definitely helps on the IQ" was clearly intentionally using such language to show a counterintuitive contrast.
Parent
How it works for me: (Score:3, Interesting)
Turn on radio, flip channels, find nothing but crap, turn it off and play my musical instrument.
It's kind of like:
Go to a burger stand, eat burger and shake, get sick, live off soup and water for a week.
Suprisingly, I thought kids are becoming dumber (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Suprisingly, I thought kids are becoming dumber (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Suprisingly, I thought kids are becoming dumber (Score:2)
Re:Suprisingly, I thought kids are becoming dumber (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Suprisingly, I thought kids are becoming dumber (Score:4, Interesting)
A number of people decry language no longer being an 'artform', something to be molded for great beauty. There will always be the wordsmiths who produce language akin to art. But since language is no longer a province of the elite, since (in the first world) the people are finally participiating in matters of import, the language will evolve for utility, and not beauty. I, for one, am fine with that.
Parent
Re:Suprisingly, I thought kids are becoming dumber (Score:3, Informative)
That's your problem right there. There are no rules of formal grammar. We don't have and English Language Authority like the French do. what is called 'standard' or 'formal' or 'proper' grammar is simply dialects of the educated class in large cities, such as London, Melbourne, New York and Chicago. It's the same 'street talk' that your kids are making up as they go along, expect it happens in the halls of academia, and the editing rooms of newspapers.
At best it's simply on
Re:Suprisingly, I thought kids are becoming dumber (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Suprisingly, I thought kids are becoming dumber (Score:5, Funny)
It's hard not to lose hope in the future of humanity when faced with such evidence.
I'm half joking, but only half.
Parent
Re:Suprisingly, I thought kids are becoming dumber (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd want to look back further. (Score:3, Insightful)
Now, I'm supposed to be happy that a kid who can't out-fight an irregular verb on a job application is "smarter" than a kid 20 years ago? Well, at least he can tell me the cheat codes for the coolest games.
Re:Suprisingly, I thought kids are becoming dumber (Score:4, Funny)
Oh well, good karma was fun while it lasted...
Parent
Comedy has certainly improved (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Comedy has certainly improved (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Well... (Score:4, Interesting)
Six months ago I bought a computer game that has been broken in nearly every sense (fun, speed, function) for $50. A couple of patches have been offered for the game that barely touch the problems, and a patch is going to be offered "real soon now" for at least two months.
The reaction in the gaming forum I visit to see if the patch is finished is absolutely and totally depressing to me. Any suggestion that this is was a ripoff is immediately torn apart by forum members, a couple of which have actually bought brand new computers to try to get their computers to run this game.
So I'm going to go ahead and disagree that critical thinking skills are being enhanced by video games. Every indication I see is that as fun as they are they're like a digital form of huffing glue for "game enthusiasts".
Maybe the IQ scores are raised only in Dumb people (Score:2, Insightful)
You would be hard pressed to convince me that if a learned person replaced their intellectual persuits with television their IQ would go up.
In his defense... (Score:3, Insightful)
Those people seem not to understand that the clichedness of bragging about not watching television outweighs any positive impression it makes.
Anyway. Not having read the book, but as I understand it from the review -- it seems perhaps unfair to criticize it for not reaching statistically meaningful conclusions. If the argument it's challenging is "Television is moronic and for morons and that's why everyone nowadays is a moron!", it seems like a reasonable counterargument. And it's not like said argument isn't made routinely.
Re:In his defense... (Score:4, Insightful)
Why does one have to brag about not watching TV? I watch rented movie once a month maybe, other than that I avoid it like the plague. It's not that it's bragging, its that I fin that watching TV results in me learning less, and getting less done. It's too easy to zone out on the preview channel for hours, and I just end up tired. Instead, I find programming or interacting with my family in my spare time to be much more enjoyable and stimulating.
I have serious doubts about the validity of this author's points. I think as previous posters have mentioned, it has far more to do with the idea that perhaps many people would not have this intellectual stimulation at all without TV, and therefore something is better than nothing.
Parent
Re:In his defense... (Score:4, Interesting)
Why do people interpret a simple statement about personal behavior as a loaded criticism? I suspect it's because on some level, they feel sort of guilty and/or criticize their own TV-watching habits, and are therefore quick to interpret discussion on the subject to be directed towards them.
I get the same thing when I say "Oh, the soup has bacon in it? No thanks, I don't eat meat." Suddenly I'm subjected to an extended monologue on why they eat meat and how they don't really eat as much as most people...
dude, eat what you want, watch what you want - I don't care, I just don't want to adopt all your habits so that you can feel comfortable.
Parent
Re:In his defense... (Score:3, Funny)
My question really is this.. (Score:3, Insightful)
It sounds like an interesting read, but I read enough fiction.
Empty television (Score:2, Insightful)
That's funny, because there is something about people who talk incessantly about The Apprentice and Desperate Housewives that makes me want to punch them. Sorry, but not watching television is as valid a choice as spending your life watching fake people do fake things and getting lobotomized by car ads and "reality" programming.
Re:Empty television (Score:3, Interesting)
My biggest problem with TV is that they don't (generally) set out to tell a story with a beginning, middle, and end; rather, they have a strong beginning, then make the middle up as they go along, extending it for as long as it's making money, then they (MAYBE) tack on a craptastic ending when it's no longer profitable, often failing to wrap up the original issues from the beginning of the show.
I have found very few shows that do not follow this formula. "Babylon 5" co
Bad argument (Score:4, Insightful)
In the first place, I didn't know videogames (tetris, pacman, Grand Tourismo), Television (Junkyard wars, animal showdown, Wolf's Rain), and the Internet (wikipedia) were bad for us.
And I can't think of ANYONE (except extreme fundamentalists) who thinks that ALL videogames, ALL Television and ALL the internet are bad for us.
Oh no... (Score:2)
Now, I don't buy into all of this nonesense - but I can certainly see this
I'm with Einstein... (Score:5, Insightful)
Albert Einstein
I tend to agree with this poem:
We are all blind until we see
That in the human plan
Nothing is worth the making
If it does not make the man
Why build these cities glorious
If man unbuilded goes
In vain we build these cities
Unless the builder also grows.
And of course:
"To educate a man in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society."
Theodore Roosevelt
Our society is plagued with menaces, and I highly doubt that will change, except to increase. If it ever does change it will start at home with better parenting and at church (yeah, yeah, don't even start).
Ob Woody Allen (Score:3, Interesting)
Average IQ increase. (Score:4, Funny)
Ah yes, the fabled "increase in average IQ score"... Apparently, we just cracked 100!
However, I predict that a plateau for the foreseeable future.
Media or Technology (Score:3, Informative)
Main evidence? (Score:3, Funny)
Wasn't LoTR written a couple of decades before SW?
More channels are better (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, total TV crap is up by a factor of 50X and the crap-to-quality factor is worse by a factor of 10, but that still means we have 5X the available hours of quality programming compared to 30 years ago.
Ironic... or is it? (Score:5, Informative)
The book raises interesting questions, but in the end is a lightweight analysis that is better for engendering sound bites on NPR and The Daily Show than for convincing serious readers.
Hmm... sound bites on NPR... That's interesting, it sounds like you probably never listen to NPR [npr.org]. The breadth and depth of their coverage far surpasses any other news source I've found. For example On Point [onpointradio.org] is a two hour program, each hour consists of:
They almost always have two or three experts in the relevant field during the discussion segment. Topics are explained and discussed with logic and level-headedness. Most of the time the topics are shown to be complicated with more sides than just the conservative vs. liberal slant you get from other news sources.
In fact I was listening when Morning Edition held a seven minute interview with the author of "Everything Bad is Good for You" back in May. I just googled for it now and it's available to listen to for free on their website: Morning Edition, May 24, 2005: Everything Bad is Good for You [npr.org].
Focus Groups Ruin Everything (Score:4, Insightful)
If you want a baloney sandwich, hire a focus group. If you want a gourmet meal, hire a chef with some flair and vision to create you a masterpiece. Admitted the gourmet meal costs more, but it's also infinitely more satifying. For those who say that the one hour format simply won't support "good TV", I'd like to point out the following, "The Sopranos", "Southpark", "The Dave Chapell Show", "Deadwood", "The Man Show" (original), "Dead Like Me", "Carnivale", and "Rome". The only thing these shows have in common is that they were produced by and air on cable TV channels. They are not beholden to the network executives and their thrice-dammned focus groups.
For those that say that video games are not good entertainment, I would offer up a few of the rather inventive RPG's I've seen lately, "I of the Dragon" and "Fable". I'd also offer the whole "SIM City" series , as well as the "SIMS" and "SIMS2" since they pretty much redefined the "Simulation" category. The direction that some of the MMORG's are going in is becoming interesting because the players have the ability to revamp the world around them as well as interact with the other players, becoming sort of a group consentual hallucination. Given that some of the religious elements have been "forcing" conversions to their faith in on-line games by threatening lower level players with virtual violence, can you imagine what would happen if you got one of those yahoos in a focus group on say, "City of Villans" or GTA?
2 cents,
Queen B
Oops. (Score:3, Informative)
Which actually proves nothing since LoTR was written well before Star Wars was even a concept.
Giving the benefit of the doubt (Score:3, Insightful)
Also, I can recall a few years ago reading a study about how children that read a lot of comic books tended to have better reading skills than those that didn't. I believe that, comic books often don't "dumb down" the language. I recall learning a lot of complex words as a child by reading comics. I also understand that a "graphic novel" recently won a Hugo Award ("The Watchers", I think).
On TV, shows like Mythbusters seen to have achieved some popularity. Shows like "The Simpson's" and especially "Futurama" sneak in some pretty sophisticated stuff from time to time as well.
Sadly, TV by and large is still prone to the lowest common denominator. Things like news channels that cycle the same 10-15 minutes worth of stories over and over throughout the day, or so-called "Reality TV" which is really just encouraging the worst in human behavior. In fairness, "Faking It" was cool because it allowed people to explore new experiences and "No Opportunity Wasted" was, in my opinion, the best of the lot, but it didn't make ratings apparently....too bad. Reality TV has gotten so pervasive that there are parodies of it ("Drawn Together", etc.).
So, I guess like everything else, there is good and bad - even in so-called "Reality TV". All the same, the next time someone wants to do "He's a Lady", perhaps we can make it more about what it takes to successfully pull off the role as opposed to simply pandering to gender sterotypes?
Enough pontificating...in the end, I suppose it's how you use the medium/art form that ultimately matters.
This too easy.... (Score:5, Insightful)
No. "The Lord of the Rings" is complex because it was a trilogy of books first. Almost 2000 pages of complexity, compared to the flimsy "she's your sister Luke" of Star Wars. Blech. Star Wars by comparison is like the O.C. in space, give me a break.
And if "Being John Malkovich" is in a sub-genre of films called mind-benders, you would have to be very ignorant of the history of movies not to at least in part attribute the history of the genre to Hitchcock.
Re:This too easy.... (Score:3, Insightful)
It is irrelevant whether Lord of the Rings was was a book first. It is irrelevant whether that book was written yesterday or 1000 years ago. The thrust of the idea is that movie plots and characters are becoming more complex. Whether those plots and characters are entirely new or lifted wholecloth from another art form is moot.
A means to no end? (Score:4, Insightful)
And who's not to say that her ability to collect and retain information is not catered to these useless data types (ie, the data type of "fall fashions"). Just because she can retain tons of information about fall fashions does not mean she can understand field lines for differential equations.
This topic ticks me off in particular because I have some young girl cousins (13, 14) and their families do nothing but feed them this useless crap. Instead of getting them a subscription to Popular Science or something (maybe even the for kids version), they shower them with Elle and Cosmo Girl. Then they reinforce the whole idea of turning themselves into objects for the boys to chase around by giving them makeup kits, little pink purses, high-cut baby tees, and accessories covered in bling. I try to talk to them about basic science and math, but they just go "huh, really?" and move on to something else. It's depressing because most of their families are non-technical types, and basically they (mainly their female relatives) are playing 'doll dress-up' with their younger siblings/kids/cousins/nieces. This wouldn't be as bad if they would reinforce some intelligent topics as well, even if it were just generic earth science or basic astronomy. Take them on some nature hikes and point out the different types of trees, look at specific plant structures and try to think how each unique plant has adapted to its environment. Take them out into some rural area in the middle of the night and take a gander at the stars. Show them how our solar system is constructed. Look at a globe and point out interesting geographical points on Earth
Correlation is not causation (Score:3, Insightful)
150 years ago, practically every city-dwelling 14-year-old in the U.S. was obliged to read and understand literature that is beyond today's typical college graduate. What changed? Plenty. It's impossible to say how much degradation should be attributed to generations of pervasive lead poisoning, how much to the deliberate demolition of the successful educational system of the time, how much to the more complex physical culture, and how much to better communication technology.
Pervasive lead poisoning is only now in decline; most Americans still live in lead-painted houses. Unleaded fuel doesn't just make oil, and engines, last many times longer. We should expect continued dramatic improvement on that basis alone.
The replacement of education with an indoctrination system, derived from India's method for keeping its lower castes in line, is one of the great crimes of the last century. Hallmarks of this system include segregation by age, sudden, arbitrary abandonment of activities, pervasive surveillance, petty authority, and enforced meaningless group exercises. (It was installed in the decades after the red scares of 1848 to make any repetition literally unthinkable.) Only in the last decade or two has there been any motion away from this goal, and most people still think of all these oppressive techniques as normal.
amazing! only3 seconds and I was rolling my eyes! (Score:3, Funny)
In other news, global warming has caused temperatures to soar into the 200's, which naturally means that humans grew a thick leathery hide to protect against burning, and all the crops have died, corresponding to human's recently developed ability to live without eating.