REVIEW | Everything Bad is Good for You, 2005.

Everything Bad is Good For You, 2005

This just in: TV makes you smart. At least, according to Steven Johnson’s new book, Everything Bad is Good For You, it does.

Wait, it gets better.

Like Atkins for your brain, Everything Bad is Good For You justifies all your secret shames, from TV to video games, postulating that because modern media is getting more and more cognitively engaging, it’s getting better and better for you.

The theory that you’re getting schooled thanks to your secret addiction to ANTM, 24, and Grand Theft Auto is based on the fact that, 20 years ago, a political philosopher named James Flynn discovered that people’s IQs were steadily rising, regardless of economics or the perceived failures of the public school system.

Johnson says pop culture is to blame.

In the book, he points out that television is a lot more complex today than it was thirty years ago. Shows of the 1970s and ‘80s, that follow just one or two main characters along single, linear plot lines, are utterly dull in comparison to today’s smorgasbord of TV excitement.

A show like ER, for example, follows more than ten key characters and multiple narrative threads, often in a single episode, while Gilmore Girls and The West Wing are filled with allusion-heavy super-speak, the details of which Johnson says actually seep into your brain to make you smart, rather than just disappearing into the ether.

By the same token, Johnson says early computer games like Pong (and others based on motor skills and repetition) can’t compare to today’s gamer mania. The fully realized worlds that have saturated the gaming industry since the premiere of Myst put Ms. Packman to shame.

And now, since you’ve actually got to think to win, Johnson writes that games today are, “about finding order and meaning in the world, and making decisions that help create that order.”

Sounds smart, doesn’t it?

The bottom line is that Johnson’s book is refreshingly unique. He isn’t interested in stuffy academic analysis of what pop culture tells us about ourselves. Rather, he’s interested in how pop culture has changed, and changed us as a result.

It’s totally worth a read.

Video may have killed the radio star, but according to Johnson, he did you a favour.

A hodgepodge of culture pieces by Jen Selk can be found here. 

A version of this piece about the book Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter by Steven Johnson, published in my regular Words book column for Dose, May 16, 2005 and is shown below.

Published in Dose magazine, May 16, 2005.