Is Everything Bad Really Good For You?

What if it turned out that playing video games didn’t rot your brain after all? What if all those hours rescuing princesses or dissecting NFL defenses actually made you smarter?

This is precisely the thesis put forth by Steven Johnson in Everything Bad is Good For You: How Today’s Popular Culture is Actually Making You Smarter. Johnson has developed what he calls the Sleeper Curve, by which despite the purposes for which we seek out popular culture – distraction, entertainment – the very act of absorbing that culture in the form of video games, television, movies, and the internet carries along hidden cognitive benefits.

Johnson attempts to distinguish content from cognition, insisting that it is not what we’re thinking as we immerse ourselves in pop culture, but how we are forced to think while doing it.

Take video games. Today’s increasingly complicated video games require traits that translate to the non-video game world – decision-making, persistence, creativity, flexibility. The hours of concentration and frustration required to master these games cultivate these cognitive skills even as gamers think they are having fun.

Johnson applies a similar argument to television, film, and the internet. He compares the plots of The Sopranos to Hill Street Blues, and Lord of the Rings to Star Wars, concluding that today’s viewers are forced to follow more characters, more settings, and more storylines – and that we are smarter for it.

I’m willing to accept Johnson’s premise that today’s pop culture is more complex and demands more attention and thought than pop culture of the past, but I’m not sold that this is a good thing.

First, looking only at the how of popular culture while ignoring the what makes for an incomplete evaluation. The most vocal critics of popular culture are not concerned that pop culture is making us dumber, but that it is making us immoral or violent. Johnson acknowledges as much: “Popular culture may not be showing us the righteous path. But it is making us smarter.” A full evaluation of whether pop culture is truly good for us would look at all its potential effects and determine if the good outweigh the bad. Johnson does no such weighing.

However, the largest gap in Johnson’s thesis is that he does not address the need for moderation. Although he acknowledges on the afterword’s penultimate page that his book should not be mistaken for an extended justification for gluing oneself to a screen, Johnson does little to drive this point home. Johnson admittedly would not endorse a regimen that included playing video games to the exclusion of all other activity – exercise, homework, social interaction, household chores – but you would not know it from his book.

In fact, the very characteristic Johnson champions in today’s pop culture – complexity – makes it less likely that we will be able to pull ourselves away. It is because so much thought is required to crack a video game that a player must spend hours upon hours playing. It is because following The Sopranos requires such a full understanding of the plot and characters that we must watch, then TiVo and rewatch each show, buy the DVD of previous seasons to catch up or refresh, and check internet chat sites to discuss the plot permutations and hidden jokes.

I’m not saying that video games, television, and the internet are bad for you. I like all three. But Johnson’s book provides an incomplete evaluation of their pros and cons before boldly declaring that they are good for us. After all, what good are sharper cognitive skills if they will only be used to better consume pop culture?