David’s Ramblings

Reviewing the book-
Everything Bad Is Good For You
by: Steven Johnson
Score: 4.9π out of 900º

Everything Bad Is Good For You is a book about our new popular culture (TV, the Internet, video games, and movies) and how, contrary to popular belief, it’s not making us dumber. In fact, all the video games, Internet surfing, and TV we’re doing is actually serving as more and more of a cognitive challenge. These things are not getting dumber and dumber, they’re getting smarter and smarter.

Everything Bad Is Good For You denies the notion that children are being made dumber as they rot out their brain in front of TV. It throws out the idea that video games are killing brain cells. It even goes so far as to say that we’re actually learning something from all these things.

Everything Bad Is Good For You goes and details something that seems rather common sense: everything is getting more complex. TV shows that used to just have a single plot now have a multitude of subplots hidden within them. Video games are beyond the simple days of pong. The Internet has us reading more and more, as well as forming and posting our own opinions to the rest of the world.

This trend in increasingly harder to deal with media shows that for some reason, the more complex it is, the more likely we are to be drawn to it. This doesn’t seem to be the rotting of the brain predicted by doomsdayers. It’s not a race to the bottom of the intellectual barrel; in fact, it seems that if the media is too simple, our culture calls it stupid.

This is the premise of the book Everything Bad Is Good For You. I highly recommend it for reading. It’s quite interesting and very well written. It gets 4.9π out of 900º.