Everything Bad is Good for You by Steven Johnson

Stephen Johnson’s Everything Bad is Good for You first published in 2005 is a non fiction discussion on popular culture.

Steven Johnson has a degree in semiotics and literature and you can kind of tell. This book has the subtitle “How popular culture is making us smarter”. That’s plenty provocative enough, so with that you expect him to plead his case well. And he does.

Johnson takes on the task of discussing mass culture as something other than a trivial past time with no inherent merit. It’s kind of a mouthful to go at, but he does it with verve and humour and a good deal of theoretical structure hiding behind the blithe smile of the text.

It’s actually a relief to find that someone is willing to discuss mass culture as something other than a guilty pleasure we all indulge in, but won’t talk about in the clear light of day. What he goes after is proving that the current expressions of mass culture have definitely become more sophisticated and challenging in later years.

When talking about computer games he point out that the most popular games are not the shoot ‘em up games that get all the attention, but the slow and painstakingly complicated ones like SimCity and Age of Empires. He pleads a good case for the delayed gratification these games offer, the things you so rarely hear discussed, like how many hours you sometimes have to spend on a relatively sedate task in order to achieve some minor goal and the frustration that goes with that.

When discussing television he compares the series Dallas to 24 or the Sopranos, making good arguments for how the complexity of the story line has something to do with the taste of the viewers. There’s also a mention of the extremely fast paced and incredibly complicated series The West Wing, a series that actually doesn’t explain anything to the viewer, and more than that, makes it really necessary for the viewer to be active rather than passive.

He also discusses things like how the show The Apprentice or Survivor requires skills like social intelligence rather than the trivia knowledge you need to keep pace in random game shows.

Why is all this relevant? Well, there’s something to it, alright.

“So this is the landscape of the Sleeper Curve. Games that force us to probe and telescope. Television shows that require the mind to fill in the blanks, or exercise its emotional intelligence. Software that makes us sit forward, not lean back. But if the long-term trend in pop culture is toward increased complexity, is there any evidence our brains are reflecting that change?” (Johnson, p. 136).

I am a child of the postmodern, or what Bauman has chosen to term “liquid modernity” so of course this approach is going to appeal to me. Johnson offer the opinion that you have to ask a different set of questions to the popular culture than has been done in the past. I’m all for it. By all means, look at the statistics and see how the levels of complexity offered in computer games challenge the players ability to vast amounts of information at a glance and what that means in terms of intelligence and information assimilation.

There’s always been a sort of canonical war between high and low culture, but there’s always been considerable crossbreeding between the two as well, and this book argues the point that the sheer complexity of some popular culture is a symptom of something or other. That, in an of itself, is enough to make this a work worth reading.

And besides… it’s fun.

Mule