Everything Bad Is Good for You
by Steven Johnson · first published 2004
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10HN commenters
2007–2024first – last mentioned
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Forget everything you've read about the age of dumbed-down, instant-gratification culture. In this provocative, intelligent, and convincing endorsement of today's mass entertainment, national bestselling author Steven Johnson argues that the pop culture we soak in every day-from The Lord of the Rings to Grand Theft Auto to The Simpsons-has been growing more and more sophisticated and, far from rotting our brains, is actually posing new cognitive challenges that are making our minds measurably sharper. You will never regard the glow of the video game or television screen the same way again.
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…meta-study and discover that "mental activity stimulates brain," please? Then we can all cite that once and for all. Whatever there is to say on this topic that's actually interesting has been said in "Everything Bad Is Good for You," a book I highly recommend.
on “Internet searching stimulates brain, study says” ↗…imposed by the form that inextricably results in a type of output. And that the job of a writer is to discover these forms and work within them. There's another line of argument, made by Steven Johnson in Everything Bad is Good for You, where viewers are trained by the media to read texts in a more sophisticated fashion. As viewers become more media savvy, the desire for surprise causes a constant creative arms race as structures that…
on “Virtually all TV comedies, from Seinfeld to South Park, follow a simple formula” ↗Steven Johnson had an interesting take on this in his book Everything Bad Is Good For You: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everything_Bad_Is_Good_for_Y... TL;DR - the complexity of media has been increasing over the past decades, which means that children spending time with digital media…
on “The impact of digital media on children’s intelligence” ↗…literacy about games very similar to one used when evaluating literature. I think this is incredibly misguided, because they're entirely different mediums (or at least should be). In Steven Johnson's Everything Bad is Good for You, he compares video games to word problems, and says video games like word problems should be judged by their cognitive challenges not their literary merit. If you want to evaluate games seriously by…
on “It’s time gamers took gaming more seriously” ↗Guess so. That's the premise of "Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter" by Steven Johnson (http://www.amazon.com/Everything-Bad-Good-You-Actually/dp/15...). Though Idiocracy is a great underappreciated film.
on “Are humans getting cleverer?” ↗Outside.in's Steve Johnson wrote a fairly buzzed-about book about popular culture ("Why Everything Bad is Good for You"). He sounds like a bright guy with a handle on American society and the populous in general. I think he'll do great things with the new company.
on “How do you build the perfect local community Web site ” ↗I am just about through with Johnson's "Why Everything Bad Is Good for You" and I would like to get in on a discussion of the book. I am a senior citizen and fascinated with the arguments he proposes, mainly because I can verify the truth in them from observing the interests…
on “How do you build the perfect local community Web site ” ↗The only fact the author cites to support his claim, that people are mostly unaffected by television, movies, and video games, is "Steven Johnson, author of Everything Bad is Good For You, writes that over the last ten years—a period of unprecedented fictional violence in television, movies, and video games—“the country simultaneously experienced the most dramatic drop in violent crime…
I haven't read it but Steven Johnson wrote a book that argued the opposite: Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter is a non-fiction book written by Steven Johnson. Published in 2005, it details Johnson's theory that popular culture – in particular television…
on “Pleasures by Aldous Huxley (1920)” ↗Isn't this just a parent-targeted rip-off of Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everything_Bad_Is_Good_for_You
on “Why dumb toys make kids smarter” ↗