So, I bought this book yesterday called "Everything Bad Is Good For You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter" by Steven Johnson. I finished it this morning. Let me start off by telling you that I have never before been so absorbed in a nonfiction book as I was with this. This is a topic that I have always thought about, but Johnson has pulled it up out of the murky depths in which it has always been hidden, polished it up, and made a remarkably persuasive argument for it. Allow me to explain.

For years, it's been drilled into our culture that video games and television will rot your brain. Supposedly, popular culture sinks down to serve the lowest common denominator, pulling the entire cultural IQ down with it. You've heard this before, we're all getting dumber and it's because we waste our time playing Halo and watching Survivor. In "Everything Bad Is Good For You," Steve Johnson asks, if pop culture is making us stupid, why have IQ scores been on a steady increase these past twenty years? He makes the point that those who dismiss video games as mindless entertainment are still thinking in terms of Pong and Pac-Man, saying, "the thing you almost never hear in the mainstream coverage, is that games are fiendishly, sometimes maddeningly, hard." Early in the book, Johnson imagines a world in which video games were invented before books, creating an entirely new point of view:

Reading books chronically understimulates the senses. Unlike the longstanding tradition of gameplaying - which engages the child in a vivid, three-dimesional world filled with moving images and musical soundscapes, navigated and controlled with complex muscular movements - books are simply a barren string of words on the page. Only a small portion of the brain devoted to processing written language is activated during reading, while games engage the full range of the sensory and motor cortices.

Books are also tragically isolating. While games have for many years engaged the young in complex social relationships with their peers, building and exploring world together, books force the child to sequester him or herself in a quiet space, shut off from interaction with other children.

Johnson makes it clear that his argument is not against books, however. He places great importance on reading, being a novelist and all. His argument is that activities such as playing video games and watching TV are not devoid of mental nutrition, that these activities are important in stimulating areas of the brain that a book can not reach. Why are kids so much better with technology than their parents? Why can junior program the VCR and grandma can't? It's not because he's memorized the manual, it's because he's so adaptable to new rules and systems.

I could honestly rant and rave about this book all day, but I will spare you and go bother my parents instead. If you are even remotely interested in defending your videogame and/or television obsession habits, I highly recommend reading this book.

-D

Posted by Dave Hoffman - Post a Comment