Rants and Ramblings: random commentary about culture, media, politics, technology and whatnot.

add it to the pile

I think I’ve just found the next book to add to my reading list: Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter, by Steven Johnson. I loved his book Emergence, which I had to read for a class in grad school; I think the appeal of that book for me had a lot to do with the fact that it devoted several pages to Sim City and The Sims and a whole chapter to the social structure of Slashdot. Plus, it was a good read.

My interest in Johnson’s newest book was piqued by a review of the book at Salon.com. The premise is that, rather than rotting our brains, popular culture, from television shows to video games, actually is priming us — youngsters in particular — to handle complexity.

Johnson attributes intelligence gains to the increasing sophistication of our media, and writes that, in particular, mass media is helping us — especially children — learn how to deal with complex technical systems. Kids today, he points out, often master electronic devices in ways that their parents can’t comprehend. They do this because their brains have been trained to understand complexity through video games and through TV; mass media, he says, prepares children for the increased difficulty that tomorrow’s world will surely offer, and it does so in a way that reading a book simply cannot do.