Home > Social Sciences > General Social Science > Everything Bad is Good for You

Everything Bad is Good for You

List Price: $14.00

Save 10.0%

You Pay: $12.60

Want this eBook?Our eBook Library Software is required to purchase and download eBooks. Download it here.

Tell a Friend

Overview

The $10 billion video gaming industry is now the second-largest segment of the entertainment industry in the United States, outstripping film and far surpassing books. Reality television shows featuring silicone-stuffed CEO wannabes and bug-eating adrenaline junkies dominate the ratings. But prominent social and cultural critic Steven Johnson argues that our popular culture has never been smarter.

Drawing from fields as diverse as neuroscience, economics, and literary theory, Johnson argues that the junk culture we're so eager to dismiss is in fact making us more intelligent. A video game will never be a book, Johnson acknowledges, nor should it aspire to be-and, in fact, video games, from Tetris to The Sims to Grand Theft Auto, have been shown to raise IQ scores and develop cognitive abilities that can't be learned from books. Likewise, successful television, when examined closely and taken seriously, reveals surprising narrative sophistication and intellectual demands.

Editorial Reviews

Worried about how much time your children spend playing video games? Don't be, advises Johnson--not only are they learning valuable problem-solving skills, they'd probably do better on an IQ test than you or your parents could at their age. Go ahead and let them watch more television, too, since even reality shows can function as "elaborately staged group psychology experiments" to stimulate rather than pacify the brain. With the same winning combination of personal revelation and friendly scientific explanation he displayed in last year's Mind Wide Open, Johnson shatters the conventional wisdom about pop culture as pabulum, showing how video games, television shows and movies have become increasingly complex. Furthermore, he says, consumers are drawn specifically to those products that require the most mental engagement, from small children who can't get enough of their favorite Disney DVDs to adults who find new layers of meaning with each repeated viewing of Seinfeld. Johnson lays out a strong case that what we do for fun is just as educational in its way as what we study in the classroom (although it's still worthwhile to encourage good reading habits, too). There's an important message here for every parent--one they should hear from the source before savvy kids (especially teens) try to take advantage of it. Agent, Lydia Wills at Paradigm. (May)
Copyright (c) Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
-- PUBLISHERS WEEKLY.

Author Information

Bio of Steven Johnson

Steven Johnson is coauthor of The Pro Wrestling Hall of Fame series. He lives in Springfield, Virginia. Heath McCoy is a pop-culture reporter for the Calgary Herald. He lives in Calgary, Alberta. Irv Muchnick's work has been published in The New York Times and the Village Voice and he is the author of Wrestling Babylon. He lives in Berkeley, California. Greg Oliver has been a professional wrestling reporter for 20 years and is coauthor of the Pro Wrestling Hall of Fame series. He lives in Toronto, Ontario.

Customer Reviews

There are no customer reviews available at this time. To add your review, Register or Sign In to your account using our free eBook Library Software.

Additional Info

Imprint

Penguin Group, Inc.

Filesize

1.71 MB

Number of Pages

272

eBook ISBN

9781429501279

Excerpt from: Everything Bad is Good for You by Steven Johnson

It is a truth nearly universally acknowledged that pop culture caters to our base instincts; mass society dumbs down and simplifies; it races to the bottom. The rare flowerings of "quality programming" only serve to remind us of the overall downward slide. But no mater how many times this refrain is belted out, it doesn't get any more accurate. As we've seen, precisely the opposite seems to be happening: the secular trend is toward greater cognitive demands, more depth, more participation. If you accept that premise, you're forced then to answer the question: Why?

For decades, the race to the bottom served as kind of a Third Law of Thermodynamics for mass society: all other things being equal, pop culture will decline into simpler forms. But if entropy turns out not to govern the world of mass society - if our entertainment is getting smarter after all - we need a new model to explain the trend. That model is a complex, layered one. The forces driving the Sleeper Curve straddle three different realms of experience: the economic, the technological, and the neurological. Part of the Sleeper Curve reflects changes in the market forces that shape popular entertainment; part emanates from long-term technological trends; and part stems from deep-seated appetites in the human brain.

The Sleeper Curve is partly powered by the force of repetition. Over the past 20 years, a fundamental shift has transformed the economics of popular entertainment: original runs are now less lucrative than repeats. In the old days of television and Hollywood, the payday came from your initial airing on network or your first run at the box office. The aftermarkets for content were marginal at best. But the mass adoption of the VCR, and cable television's hunger for syndicated programming, has turned that equation on its head. In 2003, for the first time, Hollywood made more money from DVD sales that it did from box-office receipts. Television shows repurposed as DVDs generated more than a billion dollars in sales during the same period. And the financial rewards of syndication are astronomical: shows like The Simpsons and The West Wing did well for their creators in their initial airings on network television, but the real bonanza came from their afterlife as reruns.

How do the economics of repetition connect to the Sleeper Curve? The virtue of syndication or DVD sales doesn't lie in the financial reward itself, but in the selection criteria that the reward creates in the larger entertainment ecosystem. If the ultimate goal stops being about capturing an audience's attention once, and becomes more about keeping their attention through repeat viewings, that shift is bound to have an effect on the content. Television syndication means pretty much one thing: the average fan might easily see a given episode five or 10 times, instead of the one or two viewings that you would have expected in the Big Three era. Shows that prosper in syndication do so because they can sustain five viewings without becoming tedious. And sustaining five viewings means adding complexity, not subtracting it. Reruns are generally associated with the dumbing down of popular culture, when, in fact, they're responsible for making the culture smarter.