Dumb & dumber.(Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter)(Book Review)

Steven Johnson Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter. Riverhead Books, 256 pages, $23.95

The editors at Riverhead probably thought that this title was the ultimate in counterintuitive mischievousness. To turn common sense notions on their heads, especially those bearing traditional valuations, is a familiar routine. So much complacent opinion spills into the drift of received wisdom, one supposes, that a voice against the current is just what's needed.

Maybe so, in science and technology, but the last thing intellectuals should champion right now is popular culture. Steven Johnson casts himself as a defender of a world disdained as cheap, violent, and infantile, but it's hard to play that role when economic power is all on the side of video games, ESPN, MTV, etc. Still, the tone is earnest and the thesis simple. In the last thirty years, popular culture has become "more complex and intellectually challenging ... demanding more cognitive engagement ... making our minds sharper." The content of popular culture remains often vulgar and inane, Johnson concedes, but the formal elements--rules, plotlines, allusions, interactivity--have grown more sophisticated, making today's games, weblogs, reality shows, and sitcoms into "a kind of cognitive workout" that hones mental skills. Pop culture provides something more important than "healthy messages". It cultivates "intellectual or cognitive virtues" of spatialization, pattern recognition, and problem solving, virtues that reflect twenty-first-century realities better than traditional knowledge and reading/math skills.

This is a bold claim, and one expects the empirical evidence to run deep. Most of the commentary, though, amounts to Johnson's musings upon what he observes around him. He recites the standard complaints about pop culture fare, details some computer games and television shows, and devotes a short passage to IQ scores. His authority on television seems to be the critic at Salon.com, and his awareness of the literature on IQ runs no further than a few books and articles (though he likes the pop psychology concept of "emotional intelligence").

The case for cognitive benefits begins with a fundamental feature of games: "far more than books or movies or music, games force you to make decisions." In an artificial reality, players decide where to steer a car, how to invest money, which weapon to grab. The content is juvenile, but "because learning how to think is ultimately about learning how to make the right decisions," the activity entails a collateral learning that carries over to users' real lives. The images are flashy and jumbled, but "It's not about tolerating or aestheticizing chaos; it's about finding order and meaning in the world, and making decisions that help create that order."

The benefits continue with the progressive complexity of television shows. That Hill Street Blues introduced multiple plotlines into primetime, a technique developed in Twin Peaks, ER, etc., that each episode of The Simpsons abounds with allusions, and that reality shows enact "elaborately staged group psychology experiments"--all signal the evolution of programming from the linear plots and dull patter of Starsky and Hutch.

Last, Johnson cites the evidence of IQ scores, which have risen markedly at the same time that popular ...