I just got done reading this book called 'Everything Bad is Good For You: How Today's Pop Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter'. Its written by an acclaimed scientific writer named Steven Johnson takes the accepted conventional wisdom that things in pop culture like video games, reality shows and the Web are bad for us and completely turns it on its head. In his last book, Johnson monitored his own brain waves and reported about how to better harness them, so no worries that this would be a piece of US Weekly fluff.
His argument centers around what he calls 'The Sleeper Curve', which says that all of the things that pop culture throws at us creates a much higher cognitive load and therefore, creates the ability to think, create, and solve at a higher level. He uses a number of examples and makes a compellingly provocative case that people maybe shouldn't worry so much about the content of what people (read: children) are consuming, but what they are doing with it and how it informs critical thinking.
Two examples he uses:
- People constantly bemoan video games and how they are no good for kids. But Johnson digs a little deeper and reveals how much thinking really goes into these games, which often take more than 40 hours to solve. He draws on the most popular video game of all time (one, I admit, I never much got into), The Sims: players must probe the virtual world, form hypothesis about what something might mean, reprobe with that hypothesis in mind and then learn if it worked or not. While kids don't necessarily think of it that way, repeating this process over and over again to get to the ultimate goal of the game is a lesson well learned. Compared to Pong or Ms. Pac-Man (which, I must admit, I still enjoy from time to time), which teach little more than pattern recognition, the Sleeper Curve shows itself.
- He compares TV shows of a generation ago to now. He takes highbrow shows such as 24 and compares it to Dragnet. As anyone who watches 24 knows, it takes all of your attention to follow along and they still find ways to completely shock you with the twists and turns of the plots. He compares this to Dragnet, which while an extremely popular show, really only had one thread that needed to be followed. Or even more recently, Dallas-- which although it had multiple storylines, the writers and directors used obvious clues in the scripts and staging to allow a viewer who wasn't paying such close attention to follow along. On the other end of the TV food-chain, he compares the dreaded reality shows like Survivor to The Love Boat. No one would characterize either show as high-brow entertainment, but even the casual viewer of Survivor would agree the storylines require a deep and thorough understanding of how the characters interact with each other and the fundamental fallacies of human nature to really follow along. As much as we loved the crew of the Love Boat, there was never much guessing about the roles they each played and what the outcome of the show would be.
So there-- pop culture is good for you. Us Weekly readers of the world, rejoice!
** Read a delightfully detailed review of the book by Malcolm Gladwell, of 'Tipping Point' and 'Blink' fame
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