BOOK: Everything Bad Is Good For You

Deciding to move my "book summary" posts from tumblr onto here. More streamlined and all that.

here's numero uno..

Everything Bad Is Good For You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter

By: Steven Johnson

PART ONE

     Games
Games for you to make decisions and prioritize tasks much more than literature which presents in a linear formation that takes you along a predetermined storyline. Within games, there are master objectives (say, saving the princess) as well as minor tasks that must be completed in order to reach the princess (destroying bad guys in order to reach a certain level or arena). Also, different mental skills are exercised by playing games. Instead of comparing video games to books, they would be more aptly compared to word problems which, similarly, have little to offer in way of moral lessons or psychological depth--we complain that video games have no substance and are just wasting time but it isn't the substance we should be focusing on, it's the problem solving skills that are developed by frequent game players. Life, after all, is not actually linear as books portray it to be but full of choice that determine what happens next.. much more like video games.

     Television
While television was previously known to cast one storyline throughout an episode (one that is "least objectionable") current shows now incorporate multithreading which is just a fancy word for multiple storylines. Viewers must keep track of different contexts and, quite often, different characters. Also, plotlines have become more developed in order to allow continuous entertainment after multiple viewings. There is a cognitive labor to fill in details of "in-show" jokes that are better understood after another viewing or only if you watch the show regularly or sometimes, requiring you to know bits of history of pop culture (ie The Simpsons or Family Guy.. although personally I am not a fan of either show). In addition, your memory skills are put to the test having to manage character relations that overlap in all sorts of ways. "Character trees" prove to us that shows from the past ain't got nothin' on the twisted shenanigans that go on between characters in current television. Even reality shows which are seen as the highest level of instant gratification garbage have their merits. These shows are developed for us to empathize with contestants and maybe even put ourselves in their place. This requires a different kind of intelligence: social intelligence in order to understand (and sometimes critique) what is happening on screen. Many people form silent alliances with characters in the show, thus proving that they have analyzed what is happening on screen and formed their own opinion.

     Internet
One sentence from the book pretty  much sums it up: "The rise of the Internet has challenged our minds in three fundamental and related ways: by virtue of being participatory, by forcing users to learn new interfaces, and by creating new channels for social interaction." Internet users are interacting with this fairly new medium instead of passively consuming them as with television. In addition, we must keep up with the accelerating pace of new platforms which force us to probe new environments (I'm not that clever, those words are directly from the book). These new forms of communication (IM, e-mail, etc.) have also allowed people to widen their social networks, in stark contrast to the preconceived notion that people on the internet a lot need to get out more.

     Film
While there has been a lot less progress in the film industry, it might be connected to the fact that its narratives are limited to two or three hours whereas television narratives unfold over multiple seasons, each with more than a dozen episodes. Video games also require an average of 40 hours to complete with complexity growing as the game progresses. However, one industry that has seen a high amount of development is children's films. Often, these now contain more main characters than before with more storyarcs that train the child to hold those multiple threads of consciousness, a kind of "mental calisthenics".

PART TWO
There's a pretty good wrap-up but I'm tired so this'll have to do:
This book does not aim to convince us that books should be replaced with media subcultura or that what is current is necessarily "good for us". Instead, he brings to light many examples where our popular culture is becoming more developed and that what we are ingesting by sitting in front of a screen for an hour is doing more than just melting our brain.